Abstract
This paper presents a road surface scanning system that operates with a trichromatic line scan camera with light emitting diode (LED) lighting achieving road surface resolution under a millimeter. It was part of a project named Roadkills—Intelligent systems for surveying mortality of amphibians in Portuguese roads, sponsored by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation. A trailer was developed in order to accommodate the complete system with standalone power generation, computer image capture and recording, controlled lighting to operate day or night without disturbance, incremental encoder with 5000 pulses per revolution attached to one of the trailer wheels, under a meter Global Positioning System (GPS) localization, easy to utilize with any vehicle with a trailer towing system and focused on a complete low cost solution. The paper describes the system architecture of the developed prototype, its calibration procedure, the performed experimentation and some obtained results, along with a discussion and comparison with existing systems. Sustained operating trailer speeds of up to 30 km/h are achievable without loss of quality at 4096 pixels’ image width (1 m width of road surface) with 250 µm/pixel resolution. Higher scanning speeds can be achieved by lowering the image resolution (120 km/h with 1 mm/pixel). Computer vision algorithms are under development to operate on the captured images in order to automatically detect road-kills of amphibians.
Highlights
Roads have multiple effects on wildlife, from animal mortality, habitat and population fragmentation, to modification of animal reproductive behavior
Hundreds of kilometers were covered during all the performed tests and the data was carefully analyzed after each trip
The results suggest that the main proposed objective was achieved
Summary
Roads have multiple effects on wildlife, from animal mortality, habitat and population fragmentation, to modification of animal reproductive behavior. Amphibians in particular, due to their activity patterns, population structure, and preferred habitats, are strongly affected by traffic intensity and road density [1,2]. Portugal has no national program to control deaths on the road, a common practice in other. European countries (e.g., United Kingdom and The Netherlands). This is required to identify road fatality points in order to correctly implement conservation measures [4]. Sensors 2016, 16, 558; doi:10.3390/s16040558 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors inexpensive, easy to implement, and automatic methods for the detection of road deaths in larger areas (wideinexpensive, monitoring) and time (continuous monitoring) arethe required
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