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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Built Environ.

Sec. Construction Materials

Volume 11 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1580379

This article is part of the Research Topic Innovation of Materials and Technologies in Built Environment View all articles

Investigation of Cracking Behavior in Asphalt Pavement Using Digital Image Processing Technology

Provisionally accepted
  • Zhonglian Runshi Xinjiang Coal Industry Company Limited, Changji, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Road hazards and some traffic accidents are often caused by damage of the performance of the pavement due to cracking of asphalt concrete. A simulation test was designed to investigate asphalt pavement cracking under different temperature conditions (15 °C, 0 °C, -5 °C, -15 °C) with a fixed traffic load strip. Using Gaussian filtering to eliminate texture noise (5 × 5 convolution kernels), extracting continuous crack contours through Canny operator (dual threshold 0.7/0.3), and combining with improved Otsu algorithm (32 × 32 block dynamic threshold) to achieve accurate segmentation under complex lighting conditions; Innovatively introducing a dual parameter system of fractal dimension (box dimension method) and crack rate (crack area ratio) to quantitatively characterize the complexity of crack morphology and degree of damage. And proposed using two crack characteristic parameters, fractal dimension and crack rate, to describe the extension characteristics of cracks. The results indicate that the road surface is more prone to cracking in negative zero temperature environments, with the number and rate of cracks generated at -15 ℃ being much higher than the other three low-temperature environments.Compared to the 15 ℃ environment, the crack rate increased by 18.26%. It has been confirmed that the occurrence and propagation of cracks will be exacerbated in low-temperature environments. The research results provide a theoretical basis and reference significance for the study of pavement crack resistance in cold regions.

    Keywords: Asphalt concrete, Highway pavement, Cracking, image processing, fractal

    Received: 20 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Jiang, Xu, Song, Gao and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jie Jiang, Zhonglian Runshi Xinjiang Coal Industry Company Limited, Changji, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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