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Aerial pavement condition assessment

Every block gets a score you can defend.

Fly your road network once. PavePlan assembles the orthomosaic, finds the distress, and computes an ASTM D6433 PCI for every centerline segment — then turns those scores into a treatment list with a price on it.

Create an accountSee the sample condition map

The map below is interactive and runs on demonstration data. No sales call to look at it.

ASTM D6433
The pavement condition standard your management plan already cites.
$49
Per centerline mile surveyed. Priced on the network you submit.
~40 min
Typical analysis time for a five-centerline-mile survey. You get a real percentage while it runs.
Illustrative

Sample condition map

Hand-built demonstration data — not a customer survey

Centerline miles
6.4
Segments
35
Network PCI
58
Not scored
2
CEDAR AVEGRANT AVEMILL AVEHARROW AVEQUARRY AVE1ST ST2ND ST3RD ST4TH STSTATE ROUTE 12
N
500 ft
Illustrative condition map. Every segment's score and rating is listed in the segment rail beside the map.

Segments

Select to inspect

Good85–100
Satisfactory70–85
Fair55–70
Poor40–55
Very Poor25–40
Serious10–25
Failed0–10
Not scored— outside the ramp on purpose. The imagery couldn't support a score, and the reason is on the segment.

Mill Ave

2nd St to 3rd St

PCI38Very Poor
Length
1,340 ft
Width
32 ft
Surface
Asphalt concrete
Area
42,880 sq ft

Distresses found

  • Alligator crackingMedium · 11.4% of area31deduct
  • Longitudinal crackingMedium · 486 ft14deduct
  • PatchingHigh · 3.1% of area12deduct
  • RavelingLow · 8.0% of area6deduct

Recommended treatment

Mill and 2 in. overlay

$118,400

Load-associated cracking is through the wearing course. Surface treatment would not hold.

Not measured

Rut depthNot measurable from this data

Nadir RGB imagery carries no elevation. Rut depth needs stereo photogrammetry or a laser profiler — flying lower will not produce it.

Permanent limitation of the sensor

  • ASTM D6433
  • Per-segment PCI
  • Orthomosaic assembly
  • Georeferenced distress polygons
  • Deduct-value curves
  • Centerline network join
  • Ground sample distance gating
  • Treatment and cost per segment
  • Council-ready PDF
  • Nadir RGB imagery

What you get

Five things come back from a survey.

No modules, no tiers, no platform. One asset class, one standard, scored the same way every time.

  • A defensible score per segment

    Distress polygons are georeferenced, joined to your centerline network, and converted to ASTM D6433 densities and deduct values. Every PCI arrives with the distress list it was computed from, so the number can be checked rather than believed.

  • A map that reads across a room

    Seven condition bands with hard edges and no gradient. The number and the rating word sit beside the color, and worse segments draw heavier — so the map survives a projector, a photocopy, and colorblind viewing without a special mode.

  • A plan with a price on it

    Every segment gets a recommended treatment and an estimated cost, ordered so preservation dollars land where they buy the most remaining pavement life — not simply where the pavement looks worst from the truck.

  • An engineer that reads your numbers

    Ask what to do with the budget you actually have. The answer is written from your segment table and cites the segments it came from, so you can trace any recommendation back to a score.

  • A straight answer about what it missed

    When ground sample distance or lighting cannot support a measurement, PavePlan says so in the report, in the map, and in the API — with the reason, and with whether a better flight would fix it.

  • Not included

    Rut depth, ride quality, structural capacity and subsurface condition. None of those come out of nadir RGB imagery, so PavePlan does not report them and does not estimate them.

How it works

Imagery in. A scored network out.

Three steps, and none of them are a windshield survey.
01

Fly it

Nadir imagery on parallel lines with sidelap, flown low enough that a hairline crack is more than one pixel wide. Bring geotagged frames straight off the aircraft, or an orthomosaic GeoTIFF you already have.

PavePlan reads the ground sample distance out of your imagery and tells you what it will and will not be able to measure before you are charged.

Illustrative flight plan. Nadir frames on parallel lines with sidelap — the overlap is what lets the pipeline assemble a single georeferenced mosaic.
02

Find the distress

The mosaic is cut into tiles and a segmentation model runs over every one of them. Cracking, patching, potholes, raveling, bleeding — each detection comes back as a polygon in world coordinates, not a box on a JPEG.

Tiles that are shadowed or motion-blurred are skipped, and skipped is recorded as skipped. It never becomes a zero.

Illustrative detection pass. Yellow outlines are distress polygons found in a tile. The two hatched tiles were skipped — shadow and motion blur — and the segments they fall on are reported as not scored rather than guessed.
03

Score the network

Polygons are joined onto your centerline segments and converted to ASTM D6433 distress densities. Deduct values come off the standard's curves and each segment ends with one integer PCI.

Then a treatment and a cost per segment, ordered so the preservation money goes where it buys the most remaining life.

Illustrative scoring step. Detection polygons are georeferenced, joined to the centerline segment they fall on, converted to ASTM D6433 densities, and reduced to one PCI per segment.

The wait

Forty minutes is honest. A spinner is not.

Tiled segmentation runs about a tile and a half a second, so a five-centerline-mile survey takes 30 to 45 minutes. No interface trick makes that faster — but plenty of them make it feel broken.
  • You see the centerline mileage, the price and the expected runtime before you are charged — not after.
  • Queued and analyzing look different from each other, because they are different facts.
  • The percentage comes off the tile counter. It is never a guess and it never runs backwards.
  • Come back tomorrow. The survey list carries status at a glance, and a link into a survey that is still processing lands somewhere sensible.

Surveys

Illustrative

  • Ward 3 residential

    4.8 centerline miles · finished yesterday, 6:12 pm

    Ready
    61Fairnetwork PCI · 3 segments not scored

  • Riverside corridor

    5.1 centerline miles · started 26 minutes ago

    Analyzing

    63% · detecting distress, tile 5,880 of 9,300

    about 14 minutes left

  • North industrial park

    2.3 centerline miles · paid 4 minutes ago

    Queued

    Third in the queue. Nothing has started on this survey yet — expect it to begin in about 25 minutes.

  • County Road 40

    1.9 centerline miles · stopped at 8%

    Failed

    Frames 118–204 carry no GPS tags, so the mosaic cannot be georeferenced. Re-upload those frames with geotags, or supply an orthomosaic GeoTIFF. You have not been charged for this run.

What we can't see

We tell you what the imagery couldn't support.

Ground sample distance sets a hard floor on what a camera can measure. When a measurement falls under that floor, PavePlan reports it as unavailable with the reason attached — in the app, in the PDF and in the API. It never substitutes an estimate, interpolates from a neighbouring segment, or quietly carries a previous value forward.

PCI — · Not scored

PavePlan could not measure this segment. Nothing is claimed about its condition. It is drawn in neutral gray, dashed, outside the condition ramp — and the report says why.

PCI 7 · Failed

PavePlan did measure this segment, and it is at the bottom of the ASTM scale. It is drawn in the darkest red at the heaviest weight, and it needs a crew.

These are not the same fact, and PavePlan never draws them the same way. Sending a reconstruction crew to a street nobody measured is the single worst thing this software could do.

What an unavailable measurement looks like

Styled as information, not as an error — nothing broke. And a limitation you can fly your way out of is marked differently from one that is baked into the sensor, because telling you to re-fly for a measurement the camera physically cannot produce would be a lie.

Rut depthNot measurable from this data

Nadir RGB imagery carries no elevation. Rut depth needs stereo photogrammetry or a laser profiler — flying lower will not produce it.

Permanent limitation of the sensor

Structural capacityNot measurable from this data

What is under the surface does not appear in an image of the surface. Deflection testing answers this; a camera cannot.

Permanent limitation of the sensor

Low-severity crack widthNot measured

This survey resolved at 3.2 cm/px. Separating low- from medium-severity cracking needs 1.0 cm/px or finer, so crack widths are reported by class rather than measured.

Fly at or below 55 m AGL to resolve hairline cracking

Bleeding, Sector 4Not measured

41% of this sector sits under tree-canopy shadow. Under shadow the model cannot separate a distress edge from a shadow edge, so nothing is reported here.

Re-fly between 10:00 and 14:00 for even lighting

Pavement engineer

Ask it what to do with the money you actually have.

It reads your segment table — every PCI, every distress density, every treatment cost — and answers in the units a budget hearing uses. Every recommendation names the segments behind it, so nothing has to be taken on faith.

It also leaves unscored segments out of the plan and says that it did, rather than quietly filling the gap with an assumption.

Pavement engineer

Illustrative

I have $412,000 for next fiscal year. Where does it go?

Start with preservation, not with the worst streets. Three of your four lowest-scoring segments are reconstruction candidates and together they exceed the entire budget.

Recommended treatments for this cycle
SegmentTreatmentCost
State Route 1274SatisfactoryChip seal$61,800
2nd St · Cedar to Grant62FairThin overlay, 1.5 in.$71,300
Harrow Ave · 2nd to 3rd46PoorMill and 2 in. overlay$96,500
Mill Ave · 2nd to 3rd38Very PoorMill and 2 in. overlay$118,400
Total$348,000

That leaves $64,000 uncommitted. Quarry Ave (PCI 7) and 4th St between Grant and Mill (PCI 17) both need full reconstruction, roughly $760,000 together. They will not improve, and they will not get much worse — deferring them one cycle costs less remaining life than deferring any of the four above.

3rd St between Mill and Harrow has no score — 41% canopy shadow — so I have left it out of this plan rather than assume a condition for it. A re-fly between 10:00 and 14:00 would settle it.

Pricing

$49 per centerline mile surveyed.

One number, calculated from the centerline mileage of the network you submit. You see the mileage, the total and the expected runtime before you are charged.

$49

per centerline mile

A five-centerline-mile survey is $245. There is no seat licence, no minimum and no annual platform fee — the survey is the product.

Create an account

You are charged when you submit a survey, not when you sign up.

Every survey includes

  • Orthomosaic assembly from geotagged frames — or bring an orthomosaic GeoTIFF you already have
  • ASTM D6433 distress densities and a PCI for every centerline segment
  • The condition map, shareable by link with people who have no account
  • A recommended treatment and a cost estimate on every scored segment
  • The prioritized plan as a PDF sized for a council packet
  • The pavement engineer, working over your survey's own numbers
  • A written reason for every measurement the imagery could not support

Bring one survey. Find out what your network actually scores.

Upload a flight, see the mileage and the price before you pay, and have a scored network about forty minutes later.

Create an accountLook at the sample first