Arcadis and Cyclomedia plunge into digital road inspections

Consulting and engineering organization Arcadis and Cyclomedia, the leading international company that captures data from public space and transforms it into valuable insights, are plunging into the market for digital road inspections. The two companies will perform road inspections fully automatically with Cyclomedia's expertise in high resolution 360° panoramic photos combined with highly accurate LiDAR point clouds and an algorithm developed and refined by Arcadis. The two companies announced this Thursday, June 25.

With this disruptive approach, Arcadis and Cyclomedia are setting the road inspection market in motion. The quality is at least as good as the assessment of an average road inspector. The road defects found can be converted to road segments of a hundred or a thousand meters via the Street Smart web viewer. This allows road managers to see at a glance where road maintenance is needed. And so there is no longer any reason to send inspectors out. Road authorities such as the Department of Public Works, provinces and municipalities thus save substantially on the cost of road inspections. As a result, they use their available road maintenance budgets more efficiently and at the right location. This results in more effective road maintenance and less inconvenience to road users.

"We increase quality, shorten turnaround time and reduce work for the client, so that they can act very quickly if a road section is found to be in bad shape," says Marc Hartsema, responsible for infrastructure at Arcadis. "We do this with the help of artificial intelligence, which trains an algorithm to recognize damages on images. Additional effects are safety and environmental benefits because far, far fewer vehicles need to be used. So we are really proud of it!"

''Arcadis' expertise in road surface inspection combined with Cyclomedia's imagery and point cloud makes the collaboration unique,'' said Frank Pauli, CEO Cyclomedia. ''Our high-resolution images can be excellently used to automatically detect objects via artificial intelligence. In this case it concerns road defects, but for example, we also detect advertising, traffic signs, lampposts and traffic lights in our imagery.''

The parties started with the provincial roads and during the year this will be expanded. The parties are also offering this innovation in other countries.