Image-based severity analysis of Asphalt pavement bleeding using a metaheuristic-boosted fuzzy classifier

Abstract

Pavement management systems play a vital role in maintaining transportation infrastructures by evaluating pavement distress to perform maintenance tasks efficiently. Severity analysis is an important step in this process. With an increasing focus on automating the pavement distress inspection, challenges persist, including limited attention to severity analysis of texture-based distresses and lack of applying fuzzy systems in this analysis despite the linguistic and qualitative description of severity levels. Accordingly, this paper presents a methodology leveraging computational intelligence frameworks such as fuzzy logic and metaheuristic optimization to develop a reliable system for severity analysis, particularly focusing on asphalt pavement bleeding. Employing GLSM and statistical feature extraction in conjunction with a fuzzy classifier, optimized with metaheuristic-based algorithms like GA, HBA, GWA, ARA, and SSA, the proposed boosted fuzzy classifier achieves an impressive accuracy of 93% and notable improvements in performance metrics, underscoring its superiority over classic fuzzy classifiers.