Real-time winter road surface condition monitoring using an improved residual CNN

Abstract

This paper proposes a real-time winter road surface condition (RSC) monitoring solution that automatically generates descriptive RSC information in terms of snow and ice coverage by using images from fixed traffic and weather cameras. Several state-of-the-art pre-trained deep neural networks are customized and fine-tuned to address a specific domain, classifying the amount of snow coverage on a road surface. A thorough evaluation is conducted to identify and select the best model. This evaluation uses an extensive set of experiments to test the accuracy and generalization of each model and uses transfer-learning to fine-tune each of the pre-trained models on independent images from different traffic and weather cameras. The transferability of each model, relationship between model performance and data size, and the system settings of each model are then examined. Lastly, three online weight calibration methods are proposed to automatically update the model in new environments. The result shows that re-training the model using images from a mixed set of cameras has the most promising results.