Automation of Pavement Surface Crack Detection using the Continuous Wavelet Transform

This paper presents a new approach in automation for crack detection on pavement surface images. The method is based on the continuous wavelet transform. In the first step, a separable 2D continuous wavelet transform for several scales is performed. Complex coefficient maps are built. The angle and modulus information are used to keep significant coefficients. Then, wavelet coefficients maximal values are searched and their propagation through scales is analyzed. Finally, a post-processing gives a binary image which indicates the presence or not of cracks on the pavement surface image.