Tack coat is a thin layer of asphalt between the existing pavement and asphalt overlay. During construction, insufficient tack coat layering can later cause surface defects such as slippage, shoving, and rutting. This paper proposed a method for tack coat inspection improvement using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and deep learning neural network for automatic non-uniform assessment of the applied tack coat area. In this method, the drone-captured images are exploited for assessment using a combination of Mask R-CNN and Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). Mask R-CNN is utilized to detect the tack coat region and segment the region of interest from the surroundings. GLCM is used to analyze the texture of the segmented region and measure the uniformity and non-uniformity of the tack coat on the existing pavements. The results of the field experiment showed both the intersection over union of Mask R-CNN and the non-uniformity measured by GLCM were promising with respect to their accuracy. The proposed method is automatic and cost-efficient, which would be of value to state Departments of Transportation for better management of their work in pavement construction and rehabilitation.
This work was sponsored by a grant from the Center for Integrated Asset Management for Multimodal Transportation Infrastructure Systems (CIAMTIS), a US Department of Transportation University Transportation Center, under federal grant number 69A3551847103. The authors are grateful for the support. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CIAMTIS.