2011 4th International Congress on Image and Signal Processing
Studying of Road Crack Image Detection Method
Based on the Mathematical Morphology
He Youquan
Information Science & Engineering Department
Chongqing Jiaotong University
Chongqing, China
hhh_1234567890@163.com
Abstract—According to the characteristics of pavement crack
images, this paper introduce mathematical morphology into the
applications of road image analysis and processing, in addition
propose a new method combined with the mathematical
morphology to detect the road crack image. Experimental results
show that the method can not only effectively suppress noise, but
also clearly and accurately extract the edge of the image, and
solve the problem of image edge’s damage caused by the removal
of noise. Enhance the connectivity of the fractures, sequentially
further improve the system's detection accuracy.
Keywords- Pavement detection; Mathematical morphology;
Dilation and erosion; Closing operation
I. INTRODUCTION
Edge detection is the basic techniques in the field of image
analysis, pros and cons of image edge detection algorithm
directly determine the accuracy of crack identification.
Literature [l] use the traditional method of differential operator
(Roberts, Sobel, Laplacian, Canny criteria algorithm) to solve
two-dimensional real function of the gradient, and then select
the appropriate threshold to extract the image edges. For the
noise and different kind of crack disease’s pixel distribution in
the pavement images, Literature [2] proposes a multi-faceted
structure element morphology edge detection algorithm, which
compared to the traditional edge detection has a strong anti-
noise ability. Literatures [3-4] apply the traditional methods of
mathematical morphology to the edge detection effectively and
filter out the noise at the same time without pretreatment.
Although the road crack detection has been studied in many
documents, but it can not fully meet the need of the rapid
development of highways. Mainly because of the noise
removal effect is not obvious, the measurement of fracture
characteristics is affected or more complex to implement.
According to the characteristics of pavement crack images,
this paper introduce mathematical morphology into the
applications of road image analysis and processing, in addition
proposes a new method combined with the mathematical
morphology to detect the road crack image. This method is
mainly to further repair and pruning for pre-segmentation crack
road image, improve the accuracy of follow-up cracks feature
vectors extracted. Experimental results show that the method
can not only effectively suppress noise, but also clearly and
accurately extract the edge of the image, and solve the problem
978-1-4244-9306-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: Ming Chi University of Technology. Downloaded on July 27,2021 at 15:54:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Qiu Hanxing,Wang Jian, Zhang Wei, Xie Jianfang
Information Science & Engineering Department
Chongqing Jiaotong University
Chongqing, China
qiuhanxing@qq.com
of image edge’s damage caused by the removal of noise.
Enhance the connectivity of the fractures, sequentially further
improve the system's detection accuracy.
II. IMAGE REPAIR AND PRUNING TECHNIQUES BASED ON
MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY
As the measurement of crack length is more complex, we
need to thinning the binary image split processed, so that
cracks could be reduced to a single pixel wide line in a regular.
What is more, Crack images in the binary segmentation could
damage the edge of cracks, causing cracks in the image
unconnected, and making the length measurement has some
bias. Therefore, we can use mathematical morphology method
to further repair and pruning the images of poor connectivity to
reduce the fracture characteristics measurement’s bias.
Mathematical morphology is an emerging discipline in the
field of image processing and pattern recognition, has a
rigorous mathematical theory, which is first proposed by
Matheron and Serra[5]. Its main research method is that
processing image from the a collection, and analysis image
based on structural elements. The basic idea is to use a certain
form of structural elements to measure and extract the image’s
corresponding shape, in order to achieve the purpose of image
analysis and recognition[6]. Mathematical morphology
algorithms take morphological analysis and processing
algorithms in parallel, greatly improving the image analysis
and processing speed.
Depending on the types of image processed, mathematical
morphology can be divided into binary morphology and gray-
scale morphology, the seven basic transformations is included
in which, swelling, erosion, opening, closing, hit, thickness and
thinning. Because after segmentation the image is a binary
image, so this paper is mainly used binary morphological
approach. Let the collection of binary images is A, the
collection of structural elements is B, then:
Dilation is defined as:
{ }

⎣ x ( )
A⊕ B = x | ⎡ B ∩ A⎤ ≠ ∅
⎦ (1)
Erosion operation is defined as:
967
 AΘ B = {x | ( B ) x
⊆ A}
(2)
Opening operation is defined as:
A D B = (AΘ B )⊕ B
(3)
Closing operation is defined as:
A • B = (A ⊕ B )Θ B
(4)
In these four basic operations, the role of corrosion is
making boundary shrink to internal and removing objects
which smaller than the structuring element. The role of dilation
is expanding binary object’s boundary points, merging all
scene points contacted with the object into it, and connecting
the relatively closed two objects together. That is very useful to
fill the hole of segmented objects in the image. Opening
operation is able to remove isolated dots, burrs and small
connected domains, and also smooth large object’s boundaries,
while changing its size. Closing operation can be used to fill
small cavities of objects, connect nearby objects, smooth its
borders, while changing the target image’s area unconspicuous.
According to characteristics of segmented fracture image
and morphology method, this paper presents a crack repair and
pruning algorithm of image as follows:
• Binary the segmented image, and then negated.
• According to the image characteristics select structural
element B. The size of structural elements is
determined by the width of cracks in detection images.
In this paper, we use the size of 3*3 square structuring
element.
• The first closing and then opening operation, is to
achieve the effect of removal of isolated noise spots
and enhance regional connectivity, therefore improve
the accuracy of area measurement.
• Have many times of the dilation. The number of the
dilation times is decided by cracks connectivity
features. Stop the dilation when crack images’ connect
domain are all linked together, and do the last closing
operation to fill the retain hole in the dilation process.
• Thinning images to get a single pixel wide line, and
this time can accurately measure the length of the crack
by pixel method.
Process is shown in Figure 1.
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b in a ry a n d n e g a te
S e le c t th e s tru c tu re
e le m e n t B
F irs t c lo sin g a n d
th e n o p e n in g
o p e ra tio n
M easu re area
N tim e s d ila tio n
a n d F in a l c lo s in g
o p e ra tio n
T h in n in g
M e a s u re le n g th
Figure 1. Repair and pruning algorithm flowchart.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
We collected image from Sichuan Guang'an highway
pavement cracks, then use these images to do the experiment
by the method which described above about image repair and
pruning, and get good results finally. The results are shown as
follows in Figure 2.
It can be seen from Figure 2(d), the first closing and then
opening crack image, not only protect the edge of the image
while effectively removing isolated noise point, but also
reduces the faults and holes, which greatly improved the area
measurement accuracy. After four times dilation operations and
the last closing operation, it completely fills the gap in the
cracks, and provides a guarantee to accurately thinning the
image.
Comparision of Figure 2(j) and Figure 2(k) shows that, the
images of directly thinning after segmentation and binary anti
color transform, not only contain a lot of noise, but also leave a
lot of the faults and voids, which will bring great errors when
measuring the length. But the cracks after a series of
morphological process and thinning completely form a single
pixel wide line, which provides a reliable preparation for the
accurate measurement of crack length.
 Figure 2. A series of morphological process results.

IV. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a new method combined with the
mathematical morphology to detect the road crack image. This
method is mainly based on the characteristics of
mathematicalmorphology operations for further repair and
pruning the pre-processed image. It not only effectively
suppresses the noise, but also clearly and accurately extracts
the edges of cracks. At the same time, it improves the accuracy
of cracks area and length measurement and provides a high-
quality guarantee for the follow-up cracks’ accurate location.
These methods and techniques have wide application prospects
in pavement automatic detection and maintenance systems, for
similar projects of image process also have a reference.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the Chongqing Natural Science
Foundation (CSTC, 2010AC6074) and Chongqing Jiaotong
University Graduate Innovation Foundation.

REFERENCES
[1] Kelvin, “Designs and implementation of automated systems for
pavement surface distress survey,” Journal of Infrastructure Systems, vol.
3, pp. 24-32, 2000.
[2] LI Gang, HE Yuyao, “Edge detection for road crack image with
multidirection morphological structuring elements,” Computer
Engineering and Applications, vol. 46, pp. 224-226, 2010.
[3] Guo Xiaoxin, Xu Zhiwen,Pang Yunjie, “An adaptive soft morphological
gradient filter for edge detection,” IEEE Proceedings of the 3rd
International Conference on Image and Graphics, 2004.
[4] Mukhopadhyay S, Chanda B, “Multiscale morphological segmentation
of gray-scale images,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 12,
pp. 533-549, 2003.
[5] Abe S, Bourland H, Adali T, Bengio S, “Analysis of support vector
machin,” Proceedings of IEEE Signal Processing Society Workshop,
2002.
[6] Lee J S J, Haralick R M, “Morphology edge detection,” IEEE Transon
Robotics Automat, pp. 410- 156, 1987.

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