Playcraft Distress
Turns dashcam or phone footage from a calibrated mount into a measured distress inventory. It does not merely flag defects — it sizes them in metres and square metres, so quantities feed into maintenance estimation rather than a count of red boxes.
Inventory layout — not survey data
Playcraft DistressClasses
- alligator cracking
- potholes
One row per physical defect
- Defect id
- Distance along the road, m
- Start, m
- End, m
- Lateral offset, m
- Type
- Severity
- Area, m²
- Length, m
- Width, m
- Confidence
- Frame
- Latitude
- Longitude
Alongside it
- Segment summary CSV
- Linear-plot PDF report
- Road map image
- Annotated video
- Runs on
- Windows desktop · offline
- Input
- Dashcam or phone footage from a calibrated mount
- Primary output
- Measured defect inventory as CSV, with a linear-plot PDF report
- Licence
- Per deployment
Back within a working day: the measured defect inventory, the annotated video, and a note on what your camera mount needs for sizes in metres. You keep the output.
Specification
What it does, how it arrives, what you get back
Capabilities
- Two distress classes: alligator cracking and potholes, labelled per pixel
- Length, width and area of each defect in metres, from the camera’s height, field of view and tilt
- Distance along the road measured from the footage itself; GPS, date and camera tilt read by OCR from the overlay burnt into the video
- One record per physical defect: every frame that saw the same stretch of road is fused on a metric grid of the road surface
- Severity by area for each defect — minor, moderate or severe — and the share of lane surface affected along each distressed stretch
- Manual annotation: draw a defect the model missed on the frame, and it is measured and saved to CSV
Delivery
- Desktop application for Windows; runs offline once installed
- Calibrated to your camera mount at setup: height, field of view and tilt
- Optional GPU acceleration; runs on CPU where none is present
Outputs
- Defect inventory as CSV — type, severity, length, width, area, distance along the road, lateral offset and GPS per defect
- Segment summary as CSV — each distressed stretch with its area and share of lane surface
- Linear-plot PDF report, a road map image and an annotated video
How a defect is measured
Square metres, not pixels
A pixel near the top of the frame covers far more road than one near the bottom. The camera’s height, field of view and tilt map every pixel to a point on the road, so each detection is measured where it actually lies.
Every frame that saw the same stretch of road is fused on that metric grid, and each connected region becomes one defect, with its length, width and area. Tilt is read from the overlay the recording app burns into the video; a different camera or mount is calibrated at setup.
Plan view of a road plane divided into twelve equal bands by thin rules, with a dashed centre line. Two amber defect marks of identical size lie in the same lane, one near the bottom edge and one near the top. On a narrow screen the Frame option tilts this same plane into a camera view: the bands converge toward the top, and the near mark spans several bands while the far one, identical on the road, is a small sliver.
Two defects of the same size on the road
The same plane seen through a camera mounted low over its near edge, clipped to a widescreen frame with corner ticks. The bands converge toward the top; the near defect mark spans several bands while the far one, identical on the road, is a small sliver.
In the frame the far one occupies a fraction of the rows. Pixel dimensions are not comparable between rows until camera height and field of view are supplied.
Reference
Further reading
Pavement distress types and condition rating as per IRC:82
The distress types IRC:82-2015 names, its 1-to-3 distress-based rating with the worked example, what the contracts call a PCI, and what video can measure.
The NSV survey, and what video can do with it
What MoRTH’s circulars require a network survey vehicle survey to record, and which parts recorded video can and cannot produce.
Also available
Other tools
Playcraft ATCC
Automatic traffic counter and classifier (ATCC) from recorded video.
Playcraft Chainage
Chainage-stamped survey video and a road roughness estimate, from a phone.
Airport Pavement Platform
Condition management for runways, taxiways and aprons.
Next step
Send us 15 minutes of survey footage
- Measured defect inventory as CSV
- Annotated video and linear-plot PDF report
- A note on calibration: what your camera mount needs for sizes in metres
No obligation. You keep the output. Back within a working day.