Abstract
The air-coupled ground-penetrating radar (GPR) could be used to detect the concealed cracks in the asphalt pavement layer at traffic-speed. However, the wide electromagnetic footprint of air-coupled antenna, strong pavement layer reflections, and external noise may cause detection inaccuracies. This study investigates the detectability of concealed cracks in asphalt pavement using the air-coupled GPR. An edge detection-based method is proposed to enhance the reflections from the concealed cracks. A simulation model was built to investigate the antenna footprint and reflection features of concealed cracks in the asphalt pavement layer. Laboratory tests were performed to validate the proposed enhancement method. The minimum detectable crack sizes are 10 mm and 15 mm using the 2 GHz antenna in the simulation and laboratory tests, respectively. The proposed method is automatic and robust at low spatial sampling rate, which may allow traffic-speed survey. It increases the signal-to-noise ratio from 8.38 to 13.62.
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