High speed stereoscopic pavement surface scanning system and method

A method of scanning a pavement surface for detecting pavement distress, comprising:

• providing one or more light sources mounted to a mobile vehicle for illuminating a pavement surface;
• providing one or more stereoscopic image capturing devices mounted to the mobile vehicle for capturing sequential images of the illuminated pavement surface;
• providing a plurality of positioning sensors mounted to the mobile vehicle, the positioning sensors adapted to encode movement of the mobile vehicle and provide a synchronization signal for the sequential images captured by the one or more stereoscopic image capture devices;
• and
• providing one or more computer processors configured to:
• synchronize the sequential images captured by each camera of the one or more stereoscopic image capturing devices;
• generate intensity image pairs from the synchronized sequential images;
• perform a 3D reconstruction of the illuminated pavement surface from the intensity image pairs using stereoscopic principles;
• generate a depth image and an intensity image pair from the 3D reconstruction;
• and
• process at least one of the depth image and the intensity image utilizing one or more distress detection modules to detect a type of pavement distress.