Smart patrolling: An efficient road surface monitoring using smartphone sensors and crowdsourcing

Road surface monitoring is an important problem in providing smooth road infrastructure to the commuters. The key to road condition monitoring is to detect road potholes and bumps, which affect the driving comfort and transport safety. This paper presents a smartphone based sensing and crowdsourcing technique to detect the road surface conditions. The in-built sensors of the smartphone like accelerometer and GPS1 have been used to observe the road conditions. It has been observed that several techniques in the past have been proposed using these sensors. Such techniques either use fixed threshold values which are road or vehicle condition dependent or use machine learning based classified training which requires intensive and continuous training. The motivation of our work is to improve classification accuracy of detecting road surface conditions using DTW2 technique which has not been researched on data based on motion sensors. The main features of DTW is its ability to automatically cope with time deformations and different speeds associated with time data, its simplicity is to be used in resource constrained devices such as smartphones and also the simplicity in its training procedure which is must as fast as compared to techniques such as SVM,3 HMM4 and ANN.5 Our technique shows better accuracy and efficiency with detection rate of 88.66% and 88.89% for potholes and bumps respectively, when compared with the existing techniques with the use of the proposed technique, prioritization of the road repair and maintenance can be decided based on real-time data and facts.