Road Extraction and Distress Assessment by Spaceborne, Airborne and Terrestrial Platforms

Dear Colleagues,

As known, road maintenance has a deep impact on authorities' financial plans. Currently, to reach standard safety conditions, numerous PMS systems and indicators are used for pavement assessment such as the Pavement Condition Index (PCI), or the Structure Index (SI) but, both don’t allow a rapid synoptic pavement investigation for large road networks. Moreover, due to their need to be calculated from in situ surveys, the acquisition of such indices is expensive and time consuming. Hence, in the last decade the advancement of automated or semi-automated procedures is stimulated for pavement distress detection and analysis. Here because, a great interest has grown-up in the scientific community to the adoption of remote sensed non-invasive techniques in several experimental settings.

Remote sensing represents an interesting alternative and challenge for road extraction and pavement aging condition monitoring by using both passive and active satellite sensors. Moreover, the increase in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data based on remote sensing allows us to manage and share in a more efficient way such huge data frames.

Furthermore, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) show an increase of their implications on these topics and are frequently related to field surveys. Such kinds of technologies attain higher outcomes when remote sensed data are correlated to the standardized parameters.

The aim of this special issue is to collect research or review papers focusing on innovative and multidisciplinary approaches on road extraction or distress assessment using spaceborne, aerial and terrestrial platforms in different experimental surroundings. Additionally, papers focusing on new field approaches related to spectroscopy, photogrammetry, GPR, LIDAR, laser scanners, etc. are also welcome.

Dr. Alessandro Mei
Prof. Dr. Xianfeng Zhang
Prof. Dr. Valerio Baiocchi
Guest Editors

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