Research of acquisition method for pavement surface texture based on photometric stereo techniques

A 3D reconstruction technique was applied to acquire pavement surface texture since the traditional method can´t achieve the balance between accuracy and economy. In this study, a simple pavement texture detection platform consisting of a camera, lighted sources and tripod was developed basing on four sources photometric stereo technique. Then the pictures captured by detection platform were analyzed by least square method to extract the normals of points in the pavement surface. When these normals were calculated, they were used to recover surface heights of pavements by tangent plane method. The experimental result shows that the 3D model of asphalt pavement recovered by photometric stereo technique is efficiency to reveal the pavement surface topography both in macro-scale and micro-scale.