Skip to main content

Road condition assessment made easy

Swedish geographic modelling specialist Blom is cooperating with a Finnish company, Suomen Kuntotekniikka, on road condition assessment projects, using BlomSTREET imagery which enables visual assessment of road segments where repairs are required, providing budgetary analysis of necessary maintenance and construction tasks. BlomSTREET imagery provides automatic traffic sign inventory using country-specific, official traffic sign libraries. The company says that experience from recent projects demonstrate
December 15, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
Swedish geographic modelling specialist Blom is cooperating with a Finnish company, Suomen Kuntotekniikka, on road condition assessment projects, using BlomSTREET imagery which enables visual assessment of road segments where repairs are required, providing budgetary analysis of necessary maintenance and construction tasks.

BlomSTREET imagery provides automatic traffic sign inventory using country-specific, official traffic sign libraries. The company says that experience from recent projects demonstrates that the automatic method provides a completeness of better than 90 per cent for an inventory project.  Problems caused by dense vegetation, partial signs and other intrusions can be improved using manual editing.

A standard traffic sign inventory project includes capturing coordinates (x,y,z) and orientation of the sign, standard deviation, sign type and any text contained on the sign itself.  Once images have been captured for inventory and assessment purposes they can then also be used for many alternative functions, such as city planning and 3D modelling.

"The high quality BlomSTREET imagery has been a great tool for interpreting the condition of streets. Together with ground-penetrating radar data, it allows quick identification where streets are in need of repair,” states Jari Marjeta of Suomen Kuntotekniikka.

Related Content

  • Remote remedies help US authorities identify bridge deficiencies
    September 6, 2017
    Every day 185 million vehicles – cars, trucks, school buses, emergency response units - cross one or more of America’s 55,710 'structurally compromised' steel and concrete road bridges, the highest concentration of which are in Iowa (nearly 5,000), Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. Nearly 2,000 of these crossings are located on interstate highways, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association's recent analysis of the US Department of Transportation's 2016 National Bridge Inventory.
  • Ground-breaking neutral V2X platform for C-ITS
    June 7, 2021
    Monotch's TLEX can be used by multiple stakeholders across C-ITS ecosystem
  • Is machine vision the future of enforcement?
    January 25, 2012
    Leading automated enforcement system suppliers talk about how they see machine vision technology affecting the sector in the coming years
  • Debating road user charging systems
    January 26, 2012
    Are pre-launch trials of charging systems the way to improve public acceptance? Or is the real key a more robust political attitude? Here, leading system suppliers discuss the issue. The use of distance-based Road User Charging (RUC) is now well established, at least for heavy goods vehicles on strategic roads. However demand management for all vehicles, whether a distance-based charge or some form of cordon scheme, has yet to make significant progress. This is in spite of the logic and equity of RUC being