Abstract
Road surface monitoring and maintenance are essential for driving comfort, transport safety and preserving infrastructure integrity. Traditional road condition monitoring is regularly conducted by specially designed instrumented vehicles, which requires time and money and is only able to cover a limited proportion of the road network. In light of the ubiquitous use of smartphones, this paper proposes an automatic pothole detection system utilizing the built-in vibration sensors and global positioning system receivers in smartphones. We collected road condition data in a city using dedicated vehicles and smartphones with a purpose-built mobile application designed for this study. A series of processing methods were applied to the collected data, and features from different frequency domains were extracted, along with various machine-learning classifiers. The results indicated that features from the time and frequency domains outperformed other features for identifying potholes. Among the classifiers tested, the Random Forest method exhibited the best classification performance for potholes, with a precision of 88.5% and recall of 75%. Finally, we validated the proposed method using datasets generated from different road types and examined its universality and robustness.
Highlights
Road defects, such as potholes and cracks, are becoming an increasingly significant problem for roads around the world
The objective of this study is to develop a method for detecting potholes using vibration sensors embedded in smartphones
We performed experiments on elevated roads and national roads of good quality, but during the subsequent data processing, we found that these road sections had almost no potholes; they were excluded from the analysis
Summary
Road defects, such as potholes and cracks, are becoming an increasingly significant problem for roads around the world. They present a hazard for all road users, causing considerable vehicle damage. In the US alone, one in three drivers experiences pothole-induced damage to their vehicle, spending. >3 billion US dollars annually for repairs [1]. Despite the large government investment made in maintaining and repairing road infrastructure, few people are satisfied with the quality of roads where they live or work [3]. Maintaining high-quality road infrastructure is challenging for numerous reasons, including harsh weather, unexpected road loads, and inconsistent wear and tear.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
