Practical, interactive, and object-oriented machine vision for highway crack sealing

This paper discusses a machine vision system that is used to find pavement cracks for a robotic crack sealing machine. The system includes a high-resolution digital camera which captures live or still images of the robot's 3.7 in by 4.3 m (12 ft by 14 ft) workspace. The live images are used for overall crack searching, whereas the higher resolution still images allow for accurate robot path planning. The operator interacts with the system to select cracks to be sealed. With the significant advancement in graphical and object-oriented programming, interactive and object-oriented machine vision offers advantages over fully automatic machine vision in that it is much less expensive, requires less complex hardware, its algorithms are much simpler, easier to develop and implement, and the operation can be much easier, faster, and more accurate reliable. The machine vision system described has been successfully used for sealing many actual highway pavement cracks.