Road Scanner: A Road State Scanning Approach Based on Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

The state of roads may sometimes be difficult to perceive due to intense climate conditions, absence of road signs, or simply human inattention, which may be harmful to both vehicles and drivers. The automatic monitoring of the road states represents a promising solution to warn drivers about the status of a road in order to protect them from injuries or accidents. In this paper, we present a novel application for data collection regarding road states. Our application entitled “Road Scanner” allows onboard users to tag four types of segments in roads: smooth, bumps, potholes, and others. For each tagged segment the application records multimodal data using the embedded sensors of a smartphone. The collected data concerns mainly vehicle accelerations, angular rotations, and geographical positions recorded by the accelerometer, the gyroscope, and the GPS sensor, respectively, of a user phone. Moreover, a medium-size dataset was built and machine learning models were applied to detect the right label for the road segment. Overall, the results were very promising since the SVM classifier (Support Vector Machines) has recorded an accuracy rate of 88.05%.