Image processing-based automatic detection of asphalt pavement rutting using a novel metaheuristic optimized machine learning approach

Pavement rutting refers to surface depression in the wheel-path along an asphalt road which causes loss of steering control and consequently leads to serious traffic accidents. Hence, it is necessary to develop powerful methods to accurately recognize pavement rutting during road condition survey. This study presents a novel computer vision-based model to automatically identify rutting on asphalt pavement road. The model is established based on a hybridization of image processing techniques (ITPs), least squares support vector classification (LSSVC), dynamic feature selection (FS) method, and forensic-based investigation (FBI). The ITPs, including Gabor filter and discrete cosine transform were employed to implement texture computation for image data. These techniques are used to generate an initial set of extracted features describing rutting and non-rutting states. The extracted features were then refined by a wrapper-based feature selection (FS) method to determine set of highly relevant features. LSSVC models were used to learn the categorization of rutting and non-rutting based on the refined features and hyper-parameters optimized by the FBI metaheuristic. The final LSSVC prediction model with the most desired prediction accuracy can be obtained once the process of the FBI’s optimization terminates. A dataset of 2000 image samples has been collected during field trip of pavement survey in Da Nang city (Vietnam) to construct and evaluate the newly developed model. The statistical results obtained from a k-fold cross-validation have demonstrated that the hybrid FBI-LSSVC-FS model can achieve the most desired rutting recognition performance with accuracy rate, precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.9%, 0.994, 0.984 and 0.989, respectively. Therefore, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a novel AI-based prediction model to assist transportation agencies in the task of periodic asphalt pavement survey.