Enhancing driver safety on unpaved roads with smartphone-based road roughness index and wavelet denoising

Road quality significantly affects vehicle safety, with poor conditions contributing to numerous accidents. This study utilizes smartphones to collect data and generate a road roughness index, called the Road Impact Factor (RIF), to assess ride quality on unpaved roads. Given the noise present in smartphone data, the study introduces wavelet families like Haar, Daubechies, and Symlets, along with thresholding techniques, to denoise the data. Key metrics, including mean square error and peak-to-noise ratio, evaluate the results. An application is also developed to automate the denoising and RIF calculation, supporting safer driving decisions on unpaved roads.