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Existing smartphone-based systems for detection of road surface events such as speed-breakers, potholes, broken road patches, etc. have been developed primarily for the use in four-wheeler vehicles such as cars with perfect driving maneuvers over a road with occasional irregularities. However, our experiments on a 673 km road trail in a suburban city of India, where an overall road condition is poor, show that such event detection accuracy drops to less than 80% for speed-breakers and less than 70% for potholes, when the crowdsourcing data is collected from different vehicles such as two-wheeler (bike or scooty), three-wheeler (auto-rickshaw) or four-wheeler (car) or with different smartphones kept at different positions (in-pocket, in-dashboard, vehicle-mounted).

The aim of this work is to develop a system that detects three road events — speed-breakers, potholes and broken road patches, with improved …