CPD: Crowd-based Pothole Detection

Potholes and other damages of the road surface constitute a problem being as old as roads are. Still, potholes are widespread and affect the driving comfort of passengers as well as road safety. If one knew about the exact locations of potholes, it would be possible to repair them selectively or at least to warn drivers about them up to their repair. However, both scenarios require their detection and localization. For this purpose, we propose a crowd-based approach that enables as many of the vehicles already driving on our roads as possible to detect potholes and report them to a centralized back-end application. Whereas each single vehicle provides only limited and imprecise information, it is possible to determine these information more precisely when collecting them at a large scale. These more exact information may, for example, be used to warn following vehicles about potholes lying ahead to increase overall safety and comfort. In this work, this idea is examined and an offline executable version of the desired system is implemented. Additionally, the approach is evaluated with a large database of real-world sensor readings from a testing fleet and therefore its feasibility is proved. Our investigation shows that the suggested CPD approach is promising to bring customers a benefit by an improved driving comfort and higher road safety.