Fast Measuring Pavement Crack Width by Cascading Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

Accurate quantification of pavement crack width plays a pivotal role in assessing structural integrity and guiding maintenance interventions. However, achieving precise crack width measurements presents significant challenges due to: (1) the complex, non-uniform morphology of crack boundaries, which limits the efficacy of conventional approaches, and (2) the demand for rapid measurement capabilities from arbitrary pixel locations to facilitate comprehensive pavement condition evaluation. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces a cascaded framework integrating Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Robust PCA (RPCA) for efficient crack width extraction from digital images. The proposed methodology comprises three sequential stages: (1) initial crack segmentation using established detection algorithms to generate a binary representation, (2) determination of the primary orientation axis for quasi-parallel cracks through PCA, and (3) extraction of the Main Propagation Axis (MPA) for irregular crack geometries using RPCA. Comprehensive evaluations were conducted across three publicly available datasets, demonstrating that the proposed approach achieves superior performance in both computational efficiency and measurement accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques.