CRSM: Crowdsourcing Based Road Surface Monitoring

Detecting road potholes and road roughness levels is key to road condition monitoring, which impacts transport safety and driving comfort. We propose a crowd sourcing based road surface monitoring system, simply called CRSM. CRSM can effectively detect road potholes and evaluate road roughness levels using our hardware modules mounted on distributed vehicles. These modules use low-end accelerometers and GPS devices to obtain vibration pattern, location, and vehicle velocity. 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 the multiple vehicles, and makes a comprehensive evaluation on road surface quality. We have implemented a product-quality system and deployed it on 100 taxies in the Shenzhen urban area. The results show that CRSM can detect road potholes with up to 90% accuracy, and nearly zero false alarms. CRSM can also evaluate road roughness levels correctly, even with some interferences from small bumps or potholes.