A Clustering-based Approach to Segment a Pavement Markings Line

Abstract

The maintenance of road infrastructure is a classic social challenge, especially in the context of a decreasing maintenance budget and the advent of autonomous vehicle traffic. Road markings need an accurate replacement strategy to guarantee that the markings remain perceptible. The retroreflective luminance of markings is currently dynamically quantifiable only by using a retroreflectometer such as the Ecodyn from MLPC. The main objective of this research is to construct a performance-based approach for retroreflective marking replacement adapted to a given road network. This approach involves three main tasks: localize the strategic area based on past inspections, determine an adapted decay model for a given area, and evaluate the economic impact of replacing markings. This paper focuses on the first task. We apply the Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) method to a given dataset to obtain a suitable markings line segmentation. Markings whose retroreflective luminance exhibits similar evolution over time are interpreted to belong to a specific area of the road network. When no follow-up replacement has occurred, a replacement detector deduces the date at which markings were laid from the clusters. The broken center line of the French National Road 4 illustrates the proposed approach; the road is divided into 5 clusters and 34 lifecycles. A study of markings laid in 2008 and replaced in 2012 shows important variations in the decay of the retroreflective luminance as identified by the clustering approach. Even for a single road, an optimal replacement strategy for retroreflective road markings is necessary and is composed of several local maintenance strategies.