Three-dimensional visualization model of roadway information in a pavement condition analysis

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9875576-B2
Application number	US-201614989190-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jan 6, 2016
Priority date	Jan 6, 2015
Publication date	Jan 23, 2018
Grant date	Jan 23, 2018

Abstract

A visualization of pavement conditions that are evaluated with respect to weather, pavement, and sub-surface variables provides users responsible for roadway infrastructure maintenance and monitoring with information such as depths of accumulated precipitation across “slices” of a roadway for each particular time in a given time period. The accumulated precipitation information contains the depths for each of several different types of precipitation and is shown in three dimensions, where x represents the lane of the roadway, y represents the depths of precipitation, and z represents time. A visualization model generates an appearance of a roadway lane upon which the accumulated precipitation increases or decreases over time corresponding to the results of weather and maintenance acting on that lane.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A method comprising:
ingesting a plurality of input data into a computing environment comprised of at least one processor and a computer-readable storage medium operably coupled to the at least one computer processor and having program instructions stored therein to perform one or more data processing functions, the plurality of input data representing a pavement condition in response to one or more of traffic characteristics, weather information, and existing road conditions for a specified period of time;
modeling the plurality of input data to summarize the pavement condition in one or more three-dimensional representations of accumulated precipitation on a roadway, by:
slicing the roadway into one or more representative segments and assigning a depth to each slice,
listing, for each slice, an accumulated amount of precipitation of each precipitation type on the roadway, with a first element of a list representing a first end of the roadway, and a last element of the list representing a second end of the roadway, and defining one or more groups each representing an equal portion of a slice's width of the roadway and populated with a corresponding accumulated amount of precipitation, each group having a height representing a total amount of accumulated precipitation of all precipitation types in the group,
representing each group by a rectangular prism placed contiguously along an x-axis, wherein for each precipitation type, a prism section is created inside the group, and having a same width and depth as the group, so that each prism section for each accumulated precipitation type is successively created on top of a previous prism section starting from a bottom of the group to visually render one rectangular prism per group, so that each slice represents accumulated amounts of precipitation across the width of the roadway, and

responding to a selection of one slice of roadway of interest, and rendering all of the other slices of roadway substantially transparent, while keeping the slice of interest substantially opaque to enable a detailed view of the accumulated amount of precipitation of each precipitation type at any time.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating the three-dimensional representation of the pavement condition for the specified period of time on a graphical user interface.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the pavement condition is an output of a simulation and prediction of pavement condition states on at least one representative sample of the roadway.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the traffic characteristics information includes data representing at least one of traffic speed and traffic flow, and is collected from plurality of sources that include one or more of traffic sensors, camera and video systems, global positioning systems, historical database collections, and in-vehicle communication equipment.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the weather information includes at least one of current field-level weather data and extended-range weather data.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the existing road conditions includes known road conditions collected from real-time data representing the pavement condition reported from users of the roadway.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the existing road conditions includes information provided by at least one of maintenance personnel, maintenance equipment, and a maintenance decision support system.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein a precipitation type includes at least one of liquid, ice, sleet, frost, snow, compacted snow, and no precipitation.

9. A system comprising:
a computing environment including at least one computer-readable storage medium having program instructions stored therein and a computer processor operable to execute the program instructions to summarize a pavement condition over a specified period of time in one or more three-dimensional representations within a plurality of data processing modules, the plurality of data processing modules including:
a data ingest module configured to ingest input data representing a pavement condition in response to one or more of traffic characteristic data, weather data, and existing road conditions for the specified period of time;
a conversion module configured at least to model the input data by:
slicing the roadway into one or more representative segments and assigning a depth to each slice,
listing, for each slice, an accumulated amount of precipitation of each precipitation type on the roadway, with a first element of a list representing a first end of the roadway, and a last element of the list representing a second end of the roadway, and defining one or more groups each representing an equal percentage of a slice's width of the roadway and populated with a corresponding accumulated amount of precipitation, each group having a height representing a total amount of accumulated precipitation of all precipitation types in the group, and
representing each group by a rectangular prism placed contiguously along an x-axis, wherein for each precipitation type, a prism section is created inside the group, and having a same width and depth as the group, so that each prism section for each accumulated precipitation type is successively created on top of a previous prism section starting from a bottom of the group to visually render one rectangular prism per group, so that each slice represents accumulated amounts of precipitation across the width of the roadway;

an integration module configured to respond to a selection of one slice of roadway of interest, and render all other slices or roadway substantially transparent, while keeping the slice of interest substantially opaque; and
a visualization module configured to receive output from the conversion module representing modeled input data and generate the three-dimensional representation of the pavement condition for the specified period of time on a graphical user interface.

10. The system of claim 9 , wherein the pavement condition is an output of a simulation and prediction of pavement condition states on at least one representative sample of the roadway.

11. The system of claim 9 , wherein the traffic characteristics information includes data representing at least one of traffic speed and traffic flow, and is collected from plurality of sources that include one or more of traffic sensors, camera and video systems, global positioning systems, historical database collections, and in-vehicle communication equipment.

12. The system of claim 9 , wherein the weather information includes at least one of current field-level weather data and extended-range weather data.

13. The system of claim 9 , wherein the existing road conditions includes known road conditions collected from real-time data representing the pavement condition reported from users of the roadway.

14. The system of claim 9 , wherein the existing road conditions include information provided by at least one of maintenance personnel, maintenance equipment, and a maintenance decision support system.

15. The system of claim 9 , wherein a precipitation type includes at least one of liquid, ice, sleet, frost, snow, compacted snow, and no precipitation.

16. A method of representing a summary of a pavement condition over a specified period of time as a three-dimensional visualization, comprising:
identifying a segment of a roadway and representing the segment of roadway as a sliced sample, each sliced sample having an assigned depth;
identifying accumulations of one or more types of precipitation across the sliced samp

Assignees

• Iteris Inc
• Clearag Inc

Inventors

• Bergman Robert H
• Kjeldergaard Eric Dean

Classifications

• G06T11/26

  Drawing of charts or graphs · CPC title

• B60W40/06

  Road conditions · CPC title

• G01C21/28

  with correlation of data from several navigational instruments · CPC title

• G06T17/05 Primary

  Geographic models · CPC title

• G06T11/206

  Physics · mapped topic