MIPRO 2016, May 30 - June 3, 2016, Opatija, Croatia
Automatic Pothole and Speed Breaker Detection
using Android System
Vinay Rishiwal*, Hamshan Khan **
Department of CSIT, IET, MJP Rohilkhand University, India.
Tejas Networks, Bangalore
Email: *rishi4u100@gmail.com, **hamshankhan@gmail.com
Abstract - Recent studies have shown that road surface
monitoring is essential for the municipal corporations as
well as for travelers for choosing the best road possible.
Such schemes provide the comfort and security to the
vehicle travelers. This paper presents a vibration based
approach for automatic detection of potholes and speed
breakers along with their co-ordinates. In this approach, a
database is maintained for each road, which is made
available to the public with the help of global database or
through a portal. Potholes and speed breakers are detected
along with their severity using android’s built-in
accelerometer. The results of the proposed approach are
tested over a 4 km flat road and compared to manual
inspection of pothole and speed breakers on the same
considered road. The accuracy of the proposed approach
came out to be 93.75% for detection of potholes and
speed breakers. This approach is cost efficient and very
effective for road surface monitoring.
Index Terms: pothole, speed breaker, road surface
monitoring, accelerometer
I. INTRODUCTION
Road surface monitoring is essential for municipal
corporations for quick detection and maintenance of
potholes, detecting the other abnormalities of the road
such as speed breaker rail road crossing etc and making
them accessible to the travelers will provide a better
driving experience. If such information of all roads is put
on a central server which could be accessed by anyone
freely, the drivers can choose the best possible road from
source to destination.
Road surfaces can be classified into different
categories such as smooth roads, potholes, bumps,
contraction joints, man holes, expansion joints etc [1].
The surfaces where one has to slow down his speed are
potholes and bumps (also known as speed breakers). So
to detect a speed breakers and putting them on to the
server can provide the driver prior information about the
roads so they could be able to roughly figure out what
time would be taken to complete the journey.
Currently road surface monitoring is carried out
manually by means of employing persons for this purpose
only, or by volunteer drivers locating any pothole and
reporting it to the concerned authorities. But this
approach of road condition monitoring is slow as well as
costly. Alternative to this there are two approaches for
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automatic detection of potholes, one is a responsive
system and other is unresponsive system. The
unresponsive system makes use of optical and acoustic
sensors [2]. These sensors are costly and they also need a
complex algorithm to detect the potholes. Special purpose
vehicles would have to be employed because devices
have to be mounted over the vehicle so the condition of
road is clearly visible. Another approach is responsive
system which uses inertial sensors (like accelerometer
and gyroscope) to access and analyse the irregularities.
To make the system of road monitoring attractive
to the users, this has been implemented as a service
similar to Waze [3] which makes use of little system
resources and does not add extra overhead to the
volunteers. This service of Road monitoring would run on
devices operated by Android OS [4]. Android OS is
extensively used system now a days, which makes our
system attract more volunteers for the better road
monitoring.
This paper discusses about the monitoring of road
condition using android’s built-in accelerometer, which
records 3-axis acceleration [5]. The data obtained by the
accelerometer is processed with suitable approach to
detect the type of event along with their severity.
Location co-ordinates of the place where the pothole or
the speed breaker has been detected recorded using
android’s built-in GPS system [6].
These events along with their severity and the
location co-ordinates are stored in the local database of
the mobile device. This local database is synchronized
with the global database as soon as the session ends. The
synchronization is done in such a way that the previous
road surface condition is replaced by the current one
II. RELATED WORKS
A lot of work has been done in this area of automatic
pothole detection using 3-axis accelerometer and a GPS
system. Some of them use embedded accelerometer
sensor and GPS device. This section discusses various
researches performed and different algorithms used to
detect the potholes and their drawbacks.
MIT provided a road surface monitoring system
using Smartphone technology called P2 (Pothole Patrol)
in 2008 [1], which uses smart phones accelerometer
sensor to monitor the changes in acceleration while
driving and then analyzing the accelerometer data to find
out potholes. They used 7-taxis in Boston area as the III. PROPOSED WORK
experimental vehicles. After collecting the on-board data Primarily, the 3-axis acceleration data was collected from
of accelerometers and GPS sensors, P2 passes the data to the built-in accelerometer of an android device and
different data classifiers to extract the exact pothole applied a continuous monitoring of z-axis acceleration.
information. Their algorithm is based on simple machine When any pothole or a road breaker is present it results
learning approach. They passed the x and z axis into sudden changes in the acceleration along z-axis,
acceleration data through the different filters namely: which is compared against zth and appropriately classified
speed, high-pass, z-peak, xz-ratio ad speed vs. xz ratio. into different categories.
Each of them removes one or more type of road
abnormalities causing changes in acceleration such as
speed bumps, rail road crossings etc.
Chan Kang et al. [7] improvised the idea of P2 by
introducing extra attitude information from gyroscope
sensor to distinguish between manholes and potholes and
it is referred as PDGPA (Pothole Detection using On-
board gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS).
Microsoft Research India also developed Nericell
[8] and TrafficSense [9] using Windows Mobile OS
powered Smartphone as hardware/software platform with
an array of accelerometer (sampling rate 310 Hz), and
GPS. Their algorithms are based on the simple threshold
approach z-sus (for speeds <25km/h) and z-peak (for
speeds ≥ 25 km/h). They also used virtual re -orientation 
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to adjust the orientation of the Smartphone during
driving.
Mendis et al [10] have presented a Real Time
Pothole Detection system using Android Smartphones
with Accelerometer. This algorithm is similar to z-peak
algorithm used in P2. Algorithm has been extended using
a factor Z-DIFF as the main classifying factor for
potholes and other road abnormalities. This is a
measurement of change in acceleration between two
consecutive records of accelerations. Although this
algorithm was able to address many issues for accurate
detection of potholes but it does not give any idea about
the severity of potholes. Authors only identify that
whether the pothole is large or it is a cluster of potholes.
Researchers from University of Jyväskylä 
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designed an offline data mining technique for pothole
detection [11]. They pre-processed raw data collected by
accelerometer using band-pass filters, further they used
the feature detection algorithms such as mean, peak-to-
peak ratio, standard deviation, root mean square, variance
wavelet packet decomposition and power spectrum
density. Further to reduce the features backward and
forward selection and genetic algorithms were used.
Although this approach shows a good performance in
detecting the potholes but this is too complex to be
implemented over small devices like Smartphone because
of less processing power and small memory size.
Although all of the techniques discussed in above
researches provided a good mechanism to detect the
potholes but they did not given any idea about the Fig. 3: Accelerometer for Speed Breaker Data
severity of the potholes. Our algorithm would mainly
focus on following two aspects: The road abnormalities in this paper are classified into
i. Real time detection of potholes and speed two categories viz potholes and speed breaker as given in
breakers along with their location co- Table I. Severity is calculated on a scale of 1 to 3. 1 refers
ordinates. a normal severity, 2 to high severity and 3 refers to very
ii. Severity of Potholes as well as speed high severity.
breakers on the scale of 3.

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 Table I: Event Categorization abnormality. So different threshold have been set which
are shown in the table below.
Abnormality Severity




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Pothole On the scale of 1-3
Speed breaker On the scale of 1-3 Zth Severity Level
-0.5g≤Z th<0 1
After analyzing the graphs obtained from data -g≤Z th<-0.5g 2
collected over various experimental drives it was -1.5g≤Zth<-g 3
formulated that we can use zth (threshold value of
acceleration along z-axis) to distinguish between smooth 



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road, Pothole and speed breakers. There are some graphs Zth Severity Level
shown through Fig. 1 to Fig. 3 generated for various 2g≤Zth<2.5g 1
events categorized in Table I. 2.5g≤Z th<3g 2
3g≤Zth<3.5g 3
Graph for the smooth road is given in Fig. 1,
which shows that there is no sudden change in


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acceleration. While Fig. 2 shows the graph for Pothole.
At 14th second it shows a sudden change in downward
acceleration, which marks the presence of a pothole.
Similarly, Fig. 3 is the graph of a speed breaker. In this
graph there is sudden change in aceelaration in upwads
direction which signify the presence of a speed breaker.
Threshold acceleration is being set to identify the
severity of pothole and speed breakers, which is the
maximum permissible acceleration in the vertical
direction. Further, analysis shows that if the vehicle
moved on a same pothole or a breaker with a high speed
and a slow speed the change in acceleration for high
speed will me more than that of while the vehicle is slow.
Therefoe, two thresholds are being set, one for slow
speeds (speed ≤40) and one for high speeds (speed >40).
A. Scenario of Low Speed
If the acceleration is less that 0.5g (4.9 ms-2) then a speed
breaker has detected, and if it is greater than 1.5g (14.7
ms-2) then a speed breaker has detected.
To measure the severity classes of threshold are
created which are given in the tables below.

Once the event has detected along with its severity,
current location co-ordinates are being fetched from the
built-in GPS system of android device, it is stored in the
local database specially designed for this application
which synchronizes with the global database after the
finish of journey.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
To evaluate the described algorithm the authors have
gone through the following steps.
i. Counting the potholes manually and recording
their locations using Walking GPS approach
[12]
ii. Test drive over a 4 km road
iii. Examining the database for the correctness
The selected road is of 4 km over which the test
was performed. An android phone running an application
made for this same purpose was kept in a car on the flat
horizontal surface, and the car was made to run on the
road with slow speeds. After the finish of the journey the
number of potholes and breakers detected during the
journey were counted by looking into the database. The
following table shows the potholes and speed breakers



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Table VI: Number of Potholes and speed breaker as
Zth Severity Level
recorded by the application
0≤Zth<0.5g 1
-0.5g≤Zth<0 2
-g≤Zth<-0.5g 3 Severity Level Pothole Speed Breaker
1 20 1



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Zth Severity Level 3 2 0
1.5g≤Zth<2g 1
2g≤Z th<2.5g 2 The number of potholes and speed breakers
2.5g≤Zth<3g 3 counted by manual inspection is shown in the following
table.



 Number of Potholes and speed breaker as
B. Scenario of High Speed recorded by the application

A vehicle travelling at a high speed exhibits severe jerks Severity Level Pothole Speed Breaker
as compared to the slow speeds over the same 1 18 1
2 8 1
3 2 0

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 Table VI and Table VII shows that the proposed
automated approach obtained better results as compared
to manual inspection. The correctness of the proposed
approach comes out to be 93.75%.
The proposed approached has been evaluated with the
certain constraints as given below:
1) Proposed methodology has been tested on an
android phone keeping the phone in a four
wheeler.
2) Phone is kept on a flat horizontal surface, virtual
orientation would be considered as an extra
feature.
3) Proposed method uses real time accelerometer
sensor data for the processing and detection of
events. Recording the accelerometer data along
with the time stamps in a file for further
processing is classified as an extra feature.
4) Data synchronization is done using phone’s
GPRS/3G service, implementing it on the
VANET [13][14] using phone’s Wi-Fi, would be
considered as an extra feature.
V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper discusses about the importance of road surface
monitoring in terms of comfort and safety needed by the
road travelers (humans). A vibration based approach has
[7] C. Kong, Y. Zhang, X. L. Mingming, “Data Mining System for
Road Pothole Detection with On-board Sensors” Bulletin of
advanced technology research, Vol. 5, No. 12, 2011.
[8] P. Mohan, V. N. Padmanabhan, and R. Ramjee, “Nericell: using
Mobile Smartphones for Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic
Conditions,” in Proc. of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded
Network Sensor Systems, ser. SenSys ’08., pp. 375-358, 2008.
[9] “Trafficsense: Rich monitoring of road and traffic conditions using
mobile smartphones,” Microsoft Research, Tech, Rep. MSR-TR-
2008-59, April
2008.[Online].Available:http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70573/
tr-2008-59
[10]A. Mednis, G. Strazdins, R. Zviedris, G. Kanonirs, L. Selavo, “Real
Time Pothole Detection using Android Smartphones with
Accelerometers”, IEEE, DOI: 10.1109/DCOSS.2011.5982206,
2011.
[11]H. Hautakangas and Nieminen, “Data mining for pothole
detection,” Presented at the Pro gradu seminar, University of
Jyväskylä, February 2011.
[12]R. Stoleru, T. He, and J. A. Stankovic, “Walking gps: A practical
solution for localization in manually deployed wireless sensor
networks,” in Proc. of the 29th Annual IEEE International
Conference on Local Computer Networks, ser. LCN ’04. IEEE
Computer Society, pp. 480-489, 2004.
[13] W. Liang, “Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Architectures, Research
Issues, Methodologies, Challenges, and Trends,” IJDSN, pp. 2015.
[14] 
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been presented which automatically detects the pothole
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and speed breakers with their severity levels. This
approach can be very beneficially for secure travelling
especially in unknown road conditions. Proposed
approach can be easily deployed on any android based
smart phone. Results of the paper indicate the acceptance
of the proposed approach. In future, the algorithm can be
tested over different road conditions for more complex
scenarios.

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