Identifying Road Artefacts with Mobile Devices

Virtual road concept as a tool for road quality research

“…The next virtual road segments, described in the Table 4, built upon rubble road fragments, should be much higher, which is correct again, with values ranging from 23 to even 50. To check an another algorithm, the road artefact detection method using the modified Z-STDEV method [8] was performed on the same virtual road as before. Using these methods, road artefacts which were included in the virtual road (on position of 6th, 17th and 21st segment, respectively), were detected with one false positive in data point number 106, which is in a second good road segment (class A, variant b).…”

“…There are also works covering road quality calculation from accelerometer data [3,4], especially in the crowdsourcing manner [5,6] Finally, there are also discussed proposals of creation of road artefacts database for further reuse [7]. The authors were discussing usage of streaming analytics in the cloud computer pattern for such a research, as well as described road artefact detection algorithms [8,9].…”

“…The lacking factor now is no possibility of testing new road artefacts detection methods on the set of roads not existing in the real world, the need of maintaining a huge internal database of accelerometer readings and overall problems with sharing these data between scientists. segments, manhole covers and similar were dubbed as "road artefacts" by the authors in the previous research [8] and such term will be used in this paper.…”

“…As the previous research in this topic suggests, there is a need for calibration to remove tiny accelerometer oscillations [8]. The coordinate-agnostic Global Coordinate System should be also used [10], so the device does not need to be orientated in any specific way.…”

“…The differentiation was to achieve different results in overall road readings. The same acquisition device, procedure and methodology were used as in the previous research by the authors: two devices Lumia 820 with the same software were lying in the central tunnel of the car, with a calibration procedure started before entering the traffic [8].…”