Road Surface Analysis through Machine Learning Techniques

Roads are an important part of transporting goods and products from one place to another. In developing countries, the main challenge is to maintain road conditions regularly. Roads can deteriorate from time to time. Monitoring the conditions of the roads, which may degrade with time, is very difficult, resulting in a delay in transportation and damage to the vehicles moving on the roads. Poor road conditions cause road accidents. A model is being proposed to monitor the conditions of the road surface by smartphone sensors. Accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS sensors are deployed in the mobile phones, which will help to collect data on the road conditions. After collecting the data about the road conditions, various machine learning approaches, such as supervised, multi-layered, and multiclass, are applied to data filtration. Road conditions are divided into three categories to achieve this methodology: potholes, deep traverse cracks, and smooth roads. This categorization helped in analyzing the road surface condition through smartphone sensors over all three axes instead of taking it over a single axis. Neural networks helped analyze data or road conditions more accurately than Decision Tree and SVM.