CRSM: a practical crowdsourcing-based road surface monitoring system

Detecting road potholes and road roughness levels is key to road condition monitoring, which impacts transport safety and driving comfort. We propose a crowdsourcing-based road surface monitoring system, simply called CRSM. CRSM can effectively detect road potholes and evaluate road roughness levels using hardware modules mounted on distributed vehicles. These modules use low-end accelerometers and GPS devices to obtain vibration patterns, locations, and vehicle velocities. Considering the high cost of onboard storage and wireless transmission, a novel light-weight data mining algorithm is proposed to detect road surface events and transmit potential pothole information to a central server. The server gathers reports from multiple vehicles, and makes a comprehensive evaluation on road surface quality. We have implemented a product-quality system, and have deployed it on 100 taxies in the Shenzhen urban area. The results show that CRSM can detect road potholes with 90% accuracy, with nearly zero false alarms. CRSM can also evaluate road roughness K. Chen Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China E-mail: [email protected] G. Tan Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China M. Lu Central South University, Changsha 410083, China J. Wu Temple University, PA 19122, USA levels correctly, even with some interferences from small bumps or potholes.