Frequently Asked Questions

Why INSPECH Assessment

Why do I need INSPECH Assessment? The main goal of this solution is to reduce the time it takes to deliver road inspection results from the inspector to the consumer of the inspection, often the pavement owners or managers. The tool enables users to efficiently complete digital inspections, with the optional added benefit of AI-assistance to streamline their inspection process.

How does INSPECH Assessment work? INSPECH Assessment works in three main parts.

An Inspector drives a vehicle fitted with a Hi-Res, GPS powered camera to capture video footage of the road surface.
The footage is then imported to INSPECH and displayed on digital maps. By visualizing detailed road surface images and road sections, a digital twin of the road network is provided.
An inspector can then mark road distresses manually or with AI assistance. The available reporting and charting capabilities enable assessment of the pavement condition, thereby assisting with maintenance planning.
An inspector can then publish the inspection to the end client, so that the inspection can be viewed, used interactively, or downloaded.

Who should use INSPECH Assessment?

INSPECH Assessment is designed by road engineers for road engineers, whom are typically contracted by national or local highways authorities, to undertake pavement condition assessments. These companies are usually INSPECH Partners.

Check out FAQ - INSPECH Insights to learn more about publishing to, and collaboration with your customers.

What ‘assessments’ does the product offer? The product currently offers detailed visual inspections of asphalt pavements following the inspection standard of CROW (Netherlands) and PCI (International, coming soon). The road condition is then calculated and visualized per section following the chosen inspection standard.

By default, the road condition calculation takes the most important visual distress types into account (Longitudinal Cracking, Transverse Cracking, Alligator Cracking and Potholes). Other visual distress types as defined by the PCI standard for Asphalt will be added (coming soon).

How will INSPECH Assessment help me save money? No CAPEX required - INSPECH is cloud-based.

The main cost saving is in speeding up the process of inspecting a road, generating a road inspection report, and sharing this with clients. By using AI assisted distress annotation, the human effort is reduced and the accuracy is increased.

What are the benefits of INSPECH Assessment, in a nutshell?

FASTER
Up to 5 times shorter inspection time per kilometre road;
BETTER USER EXPERIENCE
For inspectors, an efficient workflow; For clients, actionable and interactive insights;
RECURRING BUSINESS
Since clients use the same platform, any request for add-on reporting or follow-up is easy to process and provide;
CHEAPER
No CAPEX (no IT infrastructure required). Low cost entry point (pay monthly) and no software maintenance (Fully SaaS);
CONSISTENCY
AI Assisted road inspections make for more consistency over time and across inspectors.

Do you have reference customers or case studies? INSPECH has customers across the globe, from Chile to Malaysia. There are several Case Studies available on our website. Feel free to view or download these.

Is INSPECH Assessment a full Pavement Management System? No. INSPECH helps deliver road inspections better and faster, but it does not monitor optimal pavement performance or resource allocations at this moment.

How does INSPECH Assessment fit in with my customer’s existing pavement or asset management tools? INSPECH Assessment allows data exchange via common spread sheet formats, such as .csv or .xlsx files, and shapefiles. And of course, a comprehensive GIS viewer for the client to work with their road’s digital twin.

Do I have to purchase or install software on my computer? No. INSPECH is a cloud-based SaaS product. All you will need is a subscription. You can then access it from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection and browser.

Can you help me make a business case to get approval for an INSPECH subscription? Yes we can! Do not hesitate to contact us. We have enough real-world cases and materials to make your business case sound.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

How is INSPECH Assessment using AI technology? INSPECH Assessment doesn’t rely on AI technology to provide you with a digital twin of your roads. For our partners that perform the inspections we do offer AI to assist them in identifying distresses, which saves them a huge amount of time.

When I use AI, how accurate is it, and what do I still need to do? Our AI delivers high rates of accuracy for the core distress types. It may even identify some distresses better than humans, but it is not infallible. A human always needs to review the results and take the final responsibility before sending it out to a customer (a Last Mile Check).

I need to deliver a special type of road inspection report; will INSPECH’s AI help me produce this quicker? Artificial Intelligence is not like an oracle that solves all problems. It is however good at performing a specific task (identifying road distresses) quicker than a human can.

Scanning

What do I need up front, to do a road inspection? A vehicle, a camera with GPS, and a driver. Please reach out to receive our image data format guide, instructions to rig the vehicle, and best practices to capture high quality data.

Can I scan with my smart phone? This is technically possible, as long as the recordings are facing down, and properly geo-referenced. Recordings through the windscreen typically lack the quality needed to do an inspection.

Can I use drones to scan? We have not so far used drones and cannot guarantee results using these devices. It would also seem difficult for a drone pilot to operate the device at the precise heights and directions and speed needed to secure the detailed video capture we require. There are also practical limitations regarding flight time and the need for 'Line of Sight' operation.

Do you provide cameras or rigs? No, we do not. However, feel welcome to contact us about getting started.

What cameras do I need? It is possible to use any camera, as long as the recordings are facing down and are properly georeferenced. Do not hesitate to contact us for questions around optimizing your set up.

With GoPro 10 and upwards, the workflow is extra efficient: you can simply import the raw video files. INSPECH Assessment will extract the images for you and plot everything on the map.

Can I upload my Lidar or laser data? Right now INSPECH focuses on visual road images as the core data format. Other data formats are on out roadmap to be included in the product in the future.

Data

What data formats are supported by INSPECH?

In short, we need geo-referenced images: JPG, PNG or TIFF images where each pixel is referencing a certain place on earth. Typically, geo-referenced images can be generated from available GPS or, chainage data together with the image data.

Alternatively, we accept raw GoPro 10+ video files, for automated image abstraction.

When you face difficulties to meet the above data requirements, do not hesitate to contact us. We have seen many different input formats and might be able to help.

Are there additional costs for storing my data? The base fixed subscription includes up to 350 GB of storage, which is equivalent to approximately 500km/lanes. If your annual inspections are greater than 500km/lanes, extra capacity can be easily added and the storage required is included in the add-on subscription fees. There is no disruption to service.

How do I get or define road sections? Road sections can be uploaded as a shapefile, or they can be generated alongside the images that were uploaded.

How is my data managed? Customer data is stored securely with AWS. Data is backed up regularly and only accessible to you and INSPECH - and to those users you share it with explicitly.

What happens with my data? Your data remains your data. However, Inspech reserves the right to use any data uploaded into its system anonymously for research and model training to improve the overall experience for all customers.

Can I always access my data? Yes. The data belongs to you and you have continuous access to the data in INSPECH. If you decide to end your subscription, you can request for an export of your data.

Inspection reports

What types of inspection are supported by INSPECH Assessment?

INSPECH Assessment uses visual inspections only, meaning the identification of distresses is from images acquired by cameras.
By nature, the inspections are detailed visual inspections. You can use the inspection data as input for global (a.k.a. coarse) visual inspections as well.

Can I do Year-over-Year inspections? This feature is coming soon. To make year-over-year comparisons, you’ll need to start today, so you can compare inspections of the same road sections next year!

Are the inspections compliant with local standards? We support PCI as the primary detailed visual inspection standard (coming soon). For The Netherlands, we support CROW as the visual inspection standard.

What does a report look like?

Since we offer a SaaS product, the best way to consume a report is the browser based, interactive view of your data. Using the application, you have all viewing, sorting and filtering capabilities at your disposal, and you have full power over who you wish to share it with. Feel free to schedule a non-committal demonstration here.

Next to that, we offer Excel and Shapefile export formats.

Can I export images? Yes, we have options to download datasets, do keep in mind that these can be quite large!

Can I export inspection data? Yes, it is possible to export the annotated distresses in shapefile format.

Can I import my existing reports into INSPECH? It is possible to import existing reports by uploading the individual parts: images, sections (shapefile), and distresses (shapefile) when they comply with required data formats.

How do I keep the reports secure? Inspections are secured with permissions. The owner of the inspection has detailed settings available for who can see or do things.

Can an external inspection company provide the data for INSPECH Assessment? Yes, it is possible to invite an external inspection company or we can connect you to our ecosystem partners.

Plans and subscriptions

Explain to me the pricing structure. The pricing for INSPECH Assessments has a few components depending on your requirements.

First, the Base subscription is FIXED at € 11,988 for an annual subscription for 500km/lanes of inspections. This can be paid monthly.

Second, if you need more than 500km/lanes capacity, then a tiered pricing is applied which gives a lower unit price for more km/lane volume.

Third, if you want to add AI assistance to your capability, then a tiered pricing is applied for this also. This must match the total Km/lane commitment for the subscription.

Growth can be added to the subscription at any time as required.

If I sign up, what happens next? You will receive a confirmation email, and after 2 days we will provide your account details. After that, you can immediately start a new inspection.

Who can I contact for help with my subscription? Please contact support@inspech.com

How many users are supported per subscription? There is no limit to the number of users per subscription, as long as they are part of your organization.

How do I cancel my subscription? For cancellations please contact us via support@inspech.com. You may cancel at any time with a 30 day notice. A cancellation does not prohibit you from subscribing again in the future.

How can I renew my subscription? Your subscription will be automatically renewed monthly or annually, depending on the payment scheme you chose.

What payment methods are there? You will receive an invoice through email with a 14-day payment term.

What happens to my inspections and data when I cancel my subscription? The data remains yours. You have continuous access to it during your active subscription and can be downloaded at any time. When you no longer wish to have a subscription, contact us so we can arrange for a full export. For details, please visit the Data Processing and Data Protection page.

How many miles of road can I inspect in the base subscription? The INSPECH base subscription offers the capacity to inspect up to ±300 lane miles. This is based on the number of Gigabytes (350 GB) of data that is required to process and store this distance. The exact distance therefore depends on the image resolution used during inspection.

How many inspections can I do with my subscription? The number of inspections depends on the number of miles per inspection and the amount of data storage required. This is mainly determined by the number of images and the image size.

How can I increase the number of miles in my subscription? In principle, you do not have to take any action yourself. You will automatically receive a notification before you reach the limit. Based on Fair Use Policy, we charge costs for additional data storage and data processing. The exact, volume-based price models for extra miles have been calculated fairly and are available to our customers.

You can optionally choose to free up data storage by deleting inspection projects. However, one of the advantages of working with INSPECH is that inspections can be compared with each other to gain insight into the deterioration of the road surface within a certain period. By deleting inspections to free up data storage, you also remove the historical context that is required for these comparisons.

What is a ‘lane km’? What is a ‘lane mile’? A highway or road may comprise multiple lanes over its length. INSPECH captures images of single lanes at a time. If the road has multiple lanes, then scans are required for each. For example, if a 100km length of road has two lanes on each carriageway, then there are 400 lane kms.

Support

Where can I find Support documentation? After sign up, we will provide you with a link to our Support Portal.

Do you have a Getting Started guide?

Yes we do! You can find all kinds of guides and articles via our Support Portal.

Do you offer training? Yes, we offer a one hour training session via video conference, or custom training to meet your specific needs. Contact us for possibilities.

I need help, how do I contact INSPECH? Please contact us via support@inspech.com