Multiscale analyses of pavement texture during polishing

Skid resistance is essential for road user safety and depends directly on the texture of the pavement. This texture is related to the surface texture of the aggregates. During its lifetime, the texture of the pavement evolves under the wear induced by road traffic. This phenomenon is called polishing. This paper presents a multiscale method based on the continuous wavelet decomposition of pavement texture to follow the evolution of the texture of aggregates during polishing at different scales. Several indicators are proposed to assess texture evolution and to correlate with friction evolution. The relevance of these parameters is assessed on samples composed of aggregates, which surface is characterized through laboratory experiments.