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CRSM: a practical crowdsourcing-based road surface monitoring system

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Abstract

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 central 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 levels correctly, even with some interferences from small bumps or potholes.

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Notes

  1. There are various ways to deal with the problem of GPS signal being temporarily unavailable. For example, the Siemens car navigation system uses Kalman filters and auxilliary sensors [16] for dead reckoning. To simplify the online data mining algorithm, we have used a simple interpolation method, instead of more sophisticated methods.

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Acknowledgments

Kongyang Chen’s work was supported in part by the SIAT Innovation Program for Excellent Young Researchers (201307). Guang Tan’s work was supported in part by NSFC Grant No. 61379135, Shenzhen Overseas High-level Talents Innovation and Entrepreneurship Funds No. KQCX20140520154115026, Shenzhen Fundamental Research Program under Grant No. JCYJ20140610151856733, and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Popular High Performance Computers & Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Service Computing and Applications Open Grant No. SZU-GDPHPCL201410. Mingming Lu’s work was supported in part by the NSFC under Grant 60903222. Jie Wu’s work was supported in part by NSF Grants ECCS 1231461, ECCS 1128209, and CNS 1138963, CNS 1065444, and CCF 1028167.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Kongyang Chen & Guang Tan

  2. Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Kongyang Chen

  3. Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Mingming Lu

  4. Temple University, Philadelphia , PA, 19122, USA

    Jie Wu

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  1. Kongyang Chen
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  2. Guang Tan
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  3. Mingming Lu
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  4. Jie Wu
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Correspondence to Kongyang Chen or Guang Tan.

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Chen, K., Tan, G., Lu, M. et al. CRSM: a practical crowdsourcing-based road surface monitoring system. Wireless Netw 22, 765–779 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-015-0996-y

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