Damage characteristics of the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in permafrost regions based on UAV imagery

ABSTRACT

For the particular engineering-geological conditions and natural environment in permafrost regions, the highway has a high damage ratio during the operation. In warm and ice-rich permafrost regions, highway pavement and embankment have poor serviceability, which threatens driving the vehicle and safe operation. Traditional field surveys on highway damage cannot entirely, rapidly and precisely obtain the distress information along the whole road. In this paper, the Qinghai-Tibet Highway (QTH) pavement distress was investigated in 550-km-long permafrost regions based on the field surveys in 2014 and 2019 and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. The type and damage ratio of distress were extracted by the remote sensing image classification method. The pavement roughness and embankment height were acquired by the spatial analysis of geographical information system. This paper provides a novel insight and efficient method for the distress investigation and exploration of distress formation in permafrost region, which can be applied in other similar engineering projects in the cold and inclement permafrost region. Furthermore, this paper also presents valuable and first-hand field data for evaluating highway serviceability and prevention of road damage during operation and maintenance stages.

KEYWORDS:

• Permafrost engineering
• image classification
• damage ratio
• highway engineering
• roughness
• UAV

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China’s Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research [grant number 2019QZKK0905]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42001065]; the Open Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering (grant number SKLFSE202106) and the First-Class Discipline Construction Project of Ningxia University, China [grant number NXYLXK2021A03].