ASSESSMENTS FROM THE AIR

摘要

Efficient, reliable data is necessary to make informed decisions on how to best manage aging road assets. A new method to automate the collection, processing and analysis of transportation networks using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been explored by a student at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). Though the current system devised for this research is not ready for operational use, it does shed light on how to further this technology in order to obtain operational data in the future. Computer vision is a branch of computer science that studies methods for acquiring, processing and analyzing images in order to extract information. While there are current methodologies to accomplish road assessment manually and semi-auton-omously, the research done at AFIT was a proof of concept that shows how obtaining road pavement assessments could be done faster and cheaper with a system requiring minimal human interaction.