At the 35th Japan Road Conference (November 1-2, 2023, hosted by the Japan Highway Association), a paper presented by Dr. Bo-Woo Cho, President of MHI, received the Excellence Award and was commended. The award was presented to a paper whose content and presentation were deemed particularly outstanding from the perspective of contributing to the improvement of road technology and the promotion of road projects, taking into consideration originality, usefulness, reliability, clarity, presentation attitude, question-and-answer session, and other factors. Summary of Research Results: We proposed a technique for evaluating the cross-sectional shape and the amount of rut excavation based on 2D images taken by a camera installed inside a vehicle. Field tests showed that the proposed method outperforms the conventional SfM method in estimation accuracy, and the majority of the rut excavation estimation errors were less than 3 mm. Furthermore, the proposed method was also applied to the estimation of pothole depth, and it was confirmed that the relative error to the manually measured value was about 10%. Since the proposed method can be applied not only to cross-sectional profiles but also to longitudinal profiles, it is expected to be utilized in the construction of 3D profiles of road surfaces. (Research theme: Development of a simple evaluation method for rut moat and improvement of productivity of inspection work by automatic calculation of MCI)
