Efficient pothole detection using smartphone sensors

Abstract

Road safety remains a casualty in India, with potholes wrecking asphalt pavements by the dozens. A study in 2017 recorded that potholes caused the budget for road safety to increase by a whopping 100.4 per cent, and even doubled the death toll from that of the year prior. To address this situation, an effective solution is required that ensures the drivers’ safety and can prove beneficial for long term measures. This can be established by employing an apt pothole detection system which is simple yet functional. In this paper, the method for such a system is described which uses accelerometer and gyroscope, both built in the modern day smartphones, to sense potholes. Pothole induced vibrations can be measured on the axis reading, making them distinguishable. Our proposed Neural Network model is trained and evaluated on the data acquired from the sensors and classifies the potholes from the non-potholes. The neural network gives a classification accuracy of 94.78 per cent. It also presents a solid precision-recall trade-off with 0.71 precision and 0.81 recall, considerably high for a problem with class imbalance. The results indicate that the method is suitable for creating an accurate and sensitive supervised model for pothole detection.