The development of integrated road condition monitoring system for developing countries using smartphone sensors and dashcam in vehicles

Abstract

In developing countries like Timor-Leste, regular road condition monitoring is a significant subject not only for maintaining road quality but also for a national plan of road network construction. The sophisticated equipment for road surface inspection is so expensive that it is difficult to introduce them in developing countries, and the monitoring is usually achieved by manual operation. On the other hand, the utilization of ICT devices such as smartphones has gained much attention in recent years, especially in developing countries because the penetration rate of the smartphone is remarkably increasing even in developing countries. The smartphones equip various high precision sensors, i.e., accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS, and so on, in the small body in low price. In this project, we are developing an integrated road condition monitoring system that consists of smartphones, dashcams, and a server. There are similar trials in advanced countries but not so many in developing countries. This system assumes to be used in developing countries. The system is very low cost and does not require trained specialists in the field side. The items that are automatically inspected in this system were carefully selected with the local ministry of public works and include paved and unpaved classification, road roughness, road width, detection and size estimation of potholes, bumps, etc., at present. All the inspected items are visualized in Google Maps, Open Street Map, or QGIS with GPS information. The survey results are collected on a server and updated to more accurate values by the repeated surveys. On the analysis, we use several state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques. In this paper, we summarize related works and introduce this project’s target and framework, which especially focused on the developing countries, and achievements of each of our tasks.