ASSESSMENT OF GOPRO’S APPLICABILITY IN INTERNATIONAL ROUGHNESS INDEX MEASUREMENT FOR ROAD PAVEMENTS

Abstract

The percentage of infrastructures that are approximately 50 years old in Japan is rapidly increasing. In particular, the stock of roads is enormous, with more than 1,220,000 km of road length. In rural areas, prefectural and municipal roads account for more than 95% of the total road length, and pavement deterioration is progressing at many locations, requiring effective road maintenance and management. On the other hand, the maintenance and management of pavements is conducted under a severe system due to a significant decrease in public works budgets and a shortage of engineers. Under these circumstances, pavement inspection methods using visual inspection and equipment have been introduced for proper pavement inspection and preventive maintenance of pavements. In this study, a commercially available action camera is mounted on an ordinary vehicle, and vibration acceleration and GPS data are acquired by driving the vehicle. The objective of this study is to develop a road surface condition evaluation method that enables sustainable maintenance and management by estimating the International Roughness Index (IRI), an index used to evaluate pavements to riding comfort and pavement damage, from the acquired data. As a result, regression analysis using data from Niigata City with the proposed method yielded a correction function with a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.70. This demonstrates that IRI estimates can be obtained using this approach, confirming the effectiveness of GoPro-based measurement methods.