Satellite Assessment and Monitoring for Pavement Management

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CAIT project no.: CAIT-UTC-NC4

Fiscal Year: 2014/2015

Status: Final

Rutgers-CAIT Author(s): Ardeshir Faghri, Ph.D., University of Delaware, Patrick Szary, Ph.D., CAIT

External Author(s): Kaz Tabrizi, Ph.D.

Sponsor(s): USDOT-FHWA, Advanced Infrastructure Design, Inc


To minimize obstruction to the traffic, this project aims to carry out investigation of the capability of remote sensing satellite data, including Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data for use in advanced infrastructure monitoring, which is a tangible breakthrough in sensing technology allowing to assess pavement deformations with millimetric accuracy on single specific points. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an efficient tool for evaluation of traffic and environmental impact on pavements and is based on the use of a time series of satellite radar images. By bringing the SAR dataset into a GIS database, the research team is able to correlate average displacement velocities of SAR data points with respect to their proximity to mapped surface distresses, such as rutting, cracking, pot holes and eventually replace the cumbersome and inefficient periodic inspection-based infrastructure monitoring  system with continuous SAR-based system.