For roughly three years now, I have been reporting on solutions that integrate Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) for mapping operational data. Over those years, some really unique implementations of the platform have occasionally surfaced and have provided interesting fodder for blogging. Case in point: the City of Houston Pavement Assessment System.

The City of Houston Right of Way Division has the enormous task of maintaining approximately 16,000 lane miles of arterial, collector, and local streets within the City limits. Selecting streets for asphalt overlay or patching is based on a set of pavement condition ratings for the city’s various street sections. The City was, until recently, obtaining these pavement condition ratings manually. Two field personnel drove to specific street sections and visually assessed pavement for distress. As you might imagine, such a manual and time-intensive process resulted in out-of-date pavement condition data, impacting the City’s ability to perform analysis and make effective maintenance decisions. The City needed to be able to drive its roads while automatically collecting pavement condition data. Working with Microsoft partner, Idea Integration, the City implemented a first of its kind “Automated Mobile Data Collection System.”

The entire system breaks down into two subsystems … an In Vehicle system, housed in a Data Collection Vehicle van (pictured below) that is used by the City to collect raw pavement distress data, images, and video of the area in which it is travelling (this data is collected automatically with very little intervention from the operators); and an In Office system where data post-processing takes place.

As the van travels, lasers point to the ground measuring the roughness and rutting of the road, and a line scan camera captures pictures of the pavement in 12-foot sections. Meanwhile, 11 immersive media video cameras pointed in different directions take 30 frames per second. These videos allow City personnel to view the entire surroundings for closer examination and bring context to the road data being captured by the camera and lasers. During the process, a distance measurement instrument is used to accurately measure the distance travelled by the Data Collection Vehicle and an onboard GPS unit accurately measures the position of the vehicle to tag the data collected (photos, videos) with pertinent metadata.

Back at the Office, the raw data from the video cameras is processed into 360° video and the line scan camera images are analyzed through proprietary post processing software that detects road cracking and provides reporting. Resulting scores and measurement information are stored in Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Reporting Services is used to present data to users.

And here, of course, is my favorite part: the data visualization tool features Bing Maps and allows a city employee to quickly analyze the data at a high level and if they choose, view data for a specific street section. This tool offers several different interfaces and views of the data decreasing the time required to prepare reports and make decisions about street repairs. Providing a browser-based web interface that most are familiar with, Bing map allows users to get a quick overall assessment of an area of the city. Streets are color coded by quality and the selection tools available in the map interface allow users to select an area of the map to view more detailed information regarding the streets in the selected area.

The City now has the ability to drive its roads while automatically collecting pavement condition data and can view this data in high definition 360° video on a GIS application.Soon, the City will be investigating ways to build on this Bing Maps solution to provide possible information about accidents, City vehicle whereabouts, and route management.

-=Virtual Jerry