Abstract: In order to solve the problem of discontinuous detection of asphalt pavement crack, a crack detection method based on curvature filters and N-P criterion is proposed. Combined with the minimal rectangular and trigonometric tangent planes, an improved curvature filter based on the regular energy function is modified to eliminate the random noise and smooth the texture. The suspected crack targets are extracted by adopting a coarse-to-fine segmentation methodology and the geometric characteristics are applied to remove noises like blocks or spots to locate the crack and obtain the crack segments. On this basis, merged with the information of position and direction of the crack segments, the N-P criterion-based method is adopted to connect the endpoints of the crack segments and obtain the complete crack data. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect the cracks with high detection precision, such as transverse cracks, longitudinal cracks, block cracks and turtle cracks. The integrity of crack detection is more than 90.5%.

Key words: pavement crack, curvature filter, N-P criterion, crack detection, crack connection