Extended Summary 本文は pp.

761–767

Detection of Road Surface Conditions Using Tire Noise from Vehicles

Wuttiwat Kongrattanaprasert Student Member (The University of Electro-Communications, wuttiwat@ew3.ee.uec.ac.jp)
Hideyuki Nomura Non-member (The University of Electro-Communications, nomu@ee.uec.ac.jp)
Tomoo Kamakura Non-member (The University of Electro-Communications, kamakura@ee.uec.ac.jp)
Koji Ueda Non-member (Nagoya Electric Works Co., LTD, ueda.koji@nagoya-denki.co.jp)

Keywords: road surface conditions, tire noise, frequency analysis, intelligent transportation system

The detection of road surface conditions is an important process
for efficient road management. In particular, in snowy seasons, prior
information about the road conditions, such as an icy state, helps
road users or automobile drivers to obviate serious traffic accidents.
This paper is basically in line with the approach of Ueda et al. To
know general tendencies of the power spectrum, we recorded a num-
ber of tire noises at near The University of Electro-Communications
(UEC) and near Sapporo city. We detected the state of the road sur-
face: i.e., dry, wet, or snowy state. Tire noise emitted from moving
vehicles on the road surface by various mechanisms was recorded
with a PCM recoder. The noise signals are processed through a
high-pass filter with a cut off frequency of 300 Hz to remove un-
necessary signals such as engine noises and wind noise, and are
converted into the power spectrum by fast Fourier transform (FFT).
After that, we determine the frequency at which the power spec-
trum reaches the maximum. Additionally, our predicting approach
relies on the normalized magnitude of the spectrum at a frequency
of 1.5 kHz and on a frequency at which the normalized magnitude
takes a value of 0.5. The effectiveness of these three classification
indicators are verified by noise data samples obtained at the three
experimental locations and are compared with visual inspections of
actual road surfaces.
For instance, the cumulative distribution curves P̄( f ) obtained
from passing vehicles for five-minute data near UEC are shown in
Fig. 1. The magnitudes for the wet state are all lower than those for
the dry state through all frequencies. We propose two classification
indicators in accordance with the fact that easy classification of the
states is feasible when the difference between the two distribution
curves is the largest. One indicator is the normalized mangitude of
overline P̄( f ) at a frequency of 1.5 kHz or the ‘indicator at 1.5 kHz’.
The other indicator is the frequency at which the normalized magni-
tude takes a value of 0.5 or the ‘indicator at 0.5’. Without changing
the observation location, we detected tire noise for the road surface
in different states. These surface states were monitored visually us-
ing a video camera. It should be noted that both the indicators in-
deed represent the changes of the surface states.
Figure 2 shows the natural transition process between the three
different states. It is also allowed to change from dry to wet and wet
to snowy. However, the direct transition from the snowy state to the
dry state is not allowed: i.e., the wet state always exists in the pro-
cess. For the wet state, the indicator at 0.5 has the highest frequency
of the three, while the wet state in the natural process exists between
the other two states. This interchanged situation makes it difficult to
classify successfully the three states. This is important information
for classifying the dry and slushy states.
Using the observed data, accurate classification into three states
seems to be feasible by employing either indicator on the basis of
certain threshold values. The accuracy of correct detection is low
overall, the use of the indicator at 0.5 gives the highest accuracy,
and the peak-frequency method has the lowest accuracy. The main
reason why relatively high detection errors arise is that the road was
covered with slushy water and was predicted to be dry in the transi-
tion process.
Four kinds of road surfaces are exhibited. It is noted that the
curves for the slushy road are more obviously scattered than the
curves of the remaining three states. Therefore, the accuracy in clas-
sification is improved by introducing the standard deviation σ.

Fig. 2. Transition diagram for the different surface

Fig. 1. Cummulative curves of the power spectrum P̄( f ) states. Fl and Fh are the threshold frequencies for the
for passing vehicles in 5 min (UEC) indicator at 0.5

– 13 –
 Paper

Detection of Road Surface Conditions Using Tire Noise from Vehicles

Wuttiwat Kongrattanaprasert∗ Student Member
Hideyuki Nomura∗ Non-member
Tomoo Kamakura∗ Non-member
Koji Ueda∗∗ Non-member

Information on road surface conditions is important and helpful for road users such as automobile drivers, partic-
ularly in snowy seasons. In practice, the surface conditions depend greatly on the weather, road users, location, and
other relevant factors. This report is concerned with the reliable detection of the surface conditions using tire noise
from road vehicles. The road/tire noise emitted from moving vehicles varies momentarily depending on the road sur-
face properties. Then, it may be possible to passively and easily detect the state of the road surface: i.e., dry, wet, or
snowy state. To detect tire noise, we used a commercially available microphone as an acoustic sensor, which enabled
us to easily reduce the cost and size in realizing a practical system for detecting road surface conditions. We propose
a couple of simple detection methods to classify the conditions into several categories of state and to improve the clas-
sification accuracy. From the experimental results obtained in snowy areas, it has been demonstrated that an accuracy
of up to about 81% is attained in predicting the road surface states using only tire noise data.

Keywords: road surface conditions, tire noise, frequency analysis, intelligent transportation system

normalized power spectrum. The thus determined frequency

1. Introduction
The detection of road surface conditions is an important
process for efficient road management. In particular, in
snowy seasons, prior information about the road conditions,
such as an icy state, helps road users or automobile drivers
to obviate serious traffic accidents. To predict road surface
conditions 3 hours and 24 hours ahead, Saegusa and Fuji-
wara recently proposed a promising method using weather
forecast data and field data (1) . They achieved a great im-
provement in the accuracy of predicting the surface states,
particularly dry and frozen states, compared with almost the
same methods previously reported. Different views and treat-
ments were adopted in the past by McFall and Niittula (2) , who
used images of road surfaces and traffic noise from vehicles
to classify road surface conditions without weather data (3) .
Unfortunately, their approach suffered from systematic prob-
lems of high cost and unstable accuracy. For cost reduction,
the detection of the surface conditions using tire noise from
vehicles has so far been performed. Kubo et al. presented a
frequency spectrum method that enables the determination of
the frequency components and sound pressure levels of tire
noise (4) . However, the pressure levels depend greatly on, for
example, the size of the vehicle and its engine sound, thus it is
not always stable in the detection of the conditions using only
the magnitude of the spectrum. To reduce such instability,
Ueda et al. introduced the normalized power spectrum based
on the ratio of the frequency spectrum to the total power (5) .
Experimentally, they found that the high-cut frequency for
classifying dry, wet, and snowy conditions is 2 kHz in the
∗ set at a 2 m height from the road surface level so that it was
Department of Electronics, The University of Electro-Communications
1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofu 182-8585
∗∗ 19-1, Mentoku, Miwa-cho, Ama-gun, Aichi 490-1294
seems to change depending on the measurement location.
This paper is basically in line with the approach of Ueda
et al. To know general tendencies of the power spectrum, we
recorded a number of tire noises at different locations. The
noise signals are processed through a high-pass filter with a
cut off frequency of 300 Hz to remove the engine noises of
passing road vehicles and are converted into the power spec-
trum by fast Fourier transform (FFT). After that, we deter-
mined the frequency at which the power spectrum reaches
the maximum. Additionally, our predicting approach relies
on the normalized magnitude of the spectrum at a frequency
of 1.5 kHz and at a frequency at which the normalized mag-
nitude takes a value of 0.5. The effectiveness of these three
classification indicators are verified by noise data samples
obtained at the three experimental locations and are com-
pared with visual inspections of actual road surfaces.
2. Experimental Conditions
Tire noise from moving vehicles was recorded at three dif-
ferent locations: one is a sidewalk of a two-lane city road near
the campus of The University of Electro-Communications.
We call this location ‘UEC’ for short. Two other observa-
tion sites were on the sides of four-lane national roads near
Sapporo city. The roads are all asphalted.
The hardware system of the measurement we performed
near UEC is shown in Fig. 1. Tire noise emitted from moving
vehicles on the road surface by various mechanisms such as
air pumping was recorded with a PCM recorder, which was
set on a tripod on the sidewalk. A built-in microphone was
directed towards passenger vehicles at 45◦ with respect to the
road surface. Vehicles passed by at 40 km/h on average. The


c 2009 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. 761
 Fig. 1. Experimental setup for detecting tire noise from
vehicles (UEC)

recorder digitally sampled sound signals at a frequency of

22.05 kHz with 16 bit quantization. As a rule of thumb, we
classify the surface conditions into three categories (1) (6)
(a)
(i) Dry: A road surface with no water, that is truly dry.
(ii) Wet: A road that is covered with water and remains
wet. Vehicles splash water as they pass by and the
tire tracks remain for a while. This condition includes
slushy water from melted snow.
(iii) Snow-compacted: A snowy surface that has become
compacted owing to passing vehicles. The road sur-
face looks completely white, including the wheel
tracks.
At the UEC observation site, we obtained noise data for ve-
hicles with summer or regular tires only when the road was
dry or wet due to rain. The data including tire noise gener-
ated from snowy surfaces were obtained at the two observa-
tion sites near Sapporo city. All passenger vehicles seemed (b)

to have winter or studless tires. The roads have four lanes,
and vehicles were traveling at 60 km/h to 80 km/h on aver-
age. Basically, the data acquisition system was the same as
that described above, except for the microphone being set at
a height of 4.4 m from the ground. Tire noise was recorded
continuously for more than one hour.
3. Classification Methods
3.1 Peak Frequencies Sound signals recorded with
a microphone are fed to a high-pass filter with a cut off fre-
quency of 300 Hz to remove unnecessary signals such as en-
gine noise and wind noise. Then, FFT is applied to obtain a
power spectrum p( f ) ( f is frequency) for the tire noise signal
from each vehicle.
Incidentally, we usually observe that the timbre of tire
noise is dependent on road conditions. When a road has
water on its surface, for example, the pressure level of tire
noise generally increases because of water splashing. Addi-
tionally, high-frequency components seem to be auditorily
increased on the whole compared with the case when the
surface is dry. We then first focus our attention on the fre-
quency at which each tire noise attains a peak in its power
spectrum. All spectra are obtained by executing FFT on the
signal waveform that lasts for 1.5 s. We extracted manually
the individual waveforms from time history records observed
over about one hour using a free sound engine program. Fig-
ure 2 shows the peak frequencies of about 1500 vehicles that
passed by the UEC observation point. Two different condi-
tions, the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ states on the road, are the targets
of classification. Obviously, the frequency varies from vehi-
cle to vehicle, and it appears difficult to obtain information
on the road surface conditions from these randomly scattered
frequencies. However, upon averaging the frequencies over
every 20 vehicles, a definite difference appears. As can be
Fig. 2. Peak frequencies for all vehicles in the power
spectra of their tire noise
Fig. 3. Peak frequencies averaged over every 20 vehi-
cles (UEC)
seen in Fig. 3, the peak frequencies are within the range of
0.8 kHz to 1 kHz for the ‘wet’ state and are about 0.3 kHz
higher than the frequencies for the ‘dry’ state, which are con-
centrated around 0.6 kHz. This observation supports our au-
ditory sense described above.
Tire noises from trucks and buses are generally louder than
those from the remaining small cars, and difference in sig-
nal characteristic might exist between the two vehicle groups.
Actually, the tire signals we observed included those from 20
small cars, 10 trucks, 2 buses, and 2 motorcycles in the first
5 minutes. From all the data, we picked out only the signals
from small cars using the sound engine program. Figure 4
shows the time history records of the peak frequencies aver-
aged over every 20 small cars. Apparently, almost the same
patterns are obtained for the two different road states: i.e., the
peak frequencies for the wet state are 0.2 kHz or much higher
than those for the dry state. Consequently, the following two
important findings are obtained. First, it is of great neces-
sity to execute averaging for the data obtained from vehicles

762 IEEJ Trans. IA, Vol.129, No.7, 2009


Fig. 4. Peak frequencies averaged over every 20 small
cars (UEC)
in order to extract distinct difference among various states of
road surfaces. In fact, such averaging should be done over
time rather than the number of vehicles because road surface
conditions are time-varying as they depend on the weather.
Empirically, 5-minute averaging is recommended. Second,
there is no great difference between the data of the peak fre-
quencies measured from all the vehicles and from only small
cars. There seems to be no need for the pre-processing that
extracts data of only small cars.
3.2 Proposed Methods Since the sound pressure
level depends greatly on, for example, the size of the vehi-
cle and its engine sound, it is not sufficiently stable for de-
tecting the conditions on the basis of only the magnitude of
the spectrum. Prior to taking the next step, we introduce the
following function that can be defined as (5)
f
fl
p( f  )d f 
P( f ) =  f · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · (1)
p( f  )d f 
h
f l
where fl = 300 Hz is the low-cut frequency. Generally, tire
noise does not significantly contain frequency components
greater than 10 kHz; then, the upper limit of integration with
respect to frequency is determined to be fh = 10 kHz. Here-
after, we refer to P( f ) as the cumulative distribution of the
power spectrum. For instance, the cumulative distribution
curves obtained from passing vehicles for five-minute data
near UEC are shown in Fig. 5.
Both curves first increase in magnitude relatively slowly
with frequency, then the rates of increase become abrupt near
1 kHz. After that, they slow down again near 4 or 5 kHz.
Such monotonic increment tendencies of P( f ) resemble a
Gaussian distribution function. Additionally, the magnitudes
for the wet state are all lower than those for the dry state
through all frequencies. This means that the wet state pre-
dominates over the dry state in higher frequency components.
From the cumulative distributions in Fig. 5, we propose
two classification indicators in accordance with the fact that
easy classification of the states is feasible when the differ-
ence between the two distribution curves is the largest. One
indicator is the normalized magnitude of P( f ) at a frequency
of 1.5 kHz. The other indicator is the frequency at which the
normalized magnitude takes a value of 0.5. Hereafter, we
refer to these as the ‘indicator at 1.5 kHz’ and the ‘indica-
tor at 0.5’, respectively. In Fig. 5, the indicator at 1.5 kHz is
determined to be 0.5 and 0.27 for the dry and wet states, re-
spectively. The indicator at 0.5 is determined to be 1.5 kHz
and 2.2 kHz for the respective states.
電学論 D，129 巻 7 号，2009 年
Detection of Road Surface Conditions Using Tire Noise
Fig. 5. Cumulative curves of the power spectrum for
passing vehicles in 5 min (UEC)
4. Experimental Results
To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed classification
methods, we executed signal processing using tire noise de-
tected near UEC and Sapporo city. All the signals last con-
tinuously for 50 minutes. Additional data for 3 days were
obtained at the sides of a different road near Sapporo city.
4.1 Observation for 50 Minutes Without changing
the observation location, we detected tire noise signals for at
least 50 minutes for the road surface in different states. Fig-
ure 6 shows the time histories of the ‘indicator at 1.5 kHz’ for
three different states. These data are averaged magnitudes
over every 5 minutes. It is demonstrated that the proposed
indicator explicitly exhibits differences in magnitudes for the
three surface states, although the magnitude of the indicator
itself changes from location to location.
For example, the magnitude remains within the range of
0.5 to 0.6 for the dry state and within the range of 0.3 to 0.4
for the wet state near UEC. In contrast, the values are smaller
near Sapporo city, being around 0.4 and within the range of
0.2 to 0.3, respectively. Even so, the tendencies of change
in magnitude depending on the road surface conditions may
be independent of location as well as the kind of tire. The
indicator takes the largest value for the snowy state and the
smallest value for the wet state.
Data processing has been executed by the second classifi-
cation method, using the ‘indicator at 0.5’, for the same tire
noise data. The results are shown in Fig. 7. The order of
magnitude is interchanged compared with Fig. 6: i.e., the wet
surface takes the highest frequency and the snowy surface the
lowest. The frequencies for the dry state remain within the in-
termediate range of the three states. Using the observed data,
accurate classification into three states seems to be feasible
by employing either indicator because the states are perfectly
separable on the basis of certain threshold values.
4.2 Observation for 24 Hours It is of interest to ex-
tend the present methods to the daily observation of road sur-
face states that may change with time and weather.
To determine whether the indicators can actually indicate
the changeable surface states, we examined typical one-day
sound data of a long-time observation, which include all three
states of road surfaces at another location near Sapporo city.
Figure 8 shows the time histories of the two indicators. The
763
 (a)
(b)
Fig. 6. Time histories of the ‘indicator at 1.5 kHz’ for
50-minute observation near UEC (a) and Sapporo city (b)
(a)
(b)
Fig. 7. Time histories of the ‘indicator at 0.5’ for 50-
minute observation near UEC (a) and Sapporo city (b)
data collection started at 0 a.m. and ended at 0 a.m. of the
next day. These surface states were monitored visually using
a video camera. It should be noted that both the indicators
indeed represent the changes of the surface states. Overall,
the sample data are scattered in the early morning from 2
to 4 a.m., probably because the number of vehicles passing
through the observation site was small. However, the data
obtained using the indicator at 0.5 show relatively less scat-
tering results throughout the day than the data obtained using
the indicator at 1.5 kHz. Interestingly, even if the observation
764
(a)
(b)
Fig. 8. One-day observation near Sapporo city. The in-
dicator at 1.5 kHz (a) and the indicator at 0.5 (b) are pre-
sented. The observation started at 0 a.m. and ended at
0 a.m. of the next day
with the camera is unavailable, it can be roughly expected,
from the figures, that the road surface changed from the
snowy state to the wet state in the morning, remained wet un-
til 2 p.m., and subsequently changed to the dry state. At any
rate, the indicator at 0.5 takes a frequency of 1.46 kHz on av-
erage for the snowy state from 0 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Likewise,
for the wet and dry surfaces, it takes 2.20 kHz and 1.94 kHz,
respectively.
We then propose the threshold frequencies of classifica-
tion using arithmetic averaging as follows: the frequencies
are Fl = (1.46 + 1.94)/2 = 1.70 kHz between the snowy and
dry states, and Fh = (1.94 + 2.20)/2 = 2.07 kHz between the
dry and wet states.
5. Classification into Three States
Figure 9(a) shows the natural transition process between
the three different states. The snowy state may change to the
wet state upon temperature elevation and to the dry state upon
water evaporation when the temperature is further elevated. It
is also allowed to change from dry to wet and wet to snowy.
However, the direct transition from the snowy state to the dry
state is not allowed: i.e., the wet state always exists in the pro-
cess. Unfortunately, the order of the states in the indicators
we propose is different from such a natural transition order
just mentioned. As shown in Fig. 9(b), the wet and dry states
are interchanged, i.e., for the wet state, the indicator at 0.5 has
the highest frequency of the three, while the wet state in the
natural process exists between the other two states. This in-
terchanged situation makes it difficult to classify successfully
IEEJ Trans. IA, Vol.129, No.7, 2009

(a) (b)
Fig. 9. Transition diagram for the different surface
states. Fl and Fh are the threshold frequencies for the
indicator at 0.5. Specifically, Fl = 1.70 kHz and Fh =
2.07 kHz in the present experiment
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 10. Time histories of the indicator at 0.5 and the
road surface temperature for the three-day observation
near Sapporo city. Data (b) is the same as in Fig. 8(b).
Data (a) to (c) were taken over three days at the same
observation location
電学論 D，129 巻 7 号，2009 年
Detection of Road Surface Conditions Using Tire Noise
(a)
(b)
Fig. 11. Flowchart for a simple method of classifying
road surface states using the indicator frequency at 0.5
(a), and typical distribution curves for four kinds of sur-
face states (b)
the three states. In fact, at around 10 a.m. in Fig. 8(b), the in-
dicator takes almost the same frequencies as those in the dry
state after 2 p.m., but it does not mean that the road surface is
dry in the former time zone: the frequency happens to tem-
porarily take a value of 2 kHz in the transition process from
the snowy state to the wet state. This is important informa-
tion for classifying the dry and slushy states.
Three-day observation data for the indicator at 0.5, includ-
ing sound signals from the preceding day and the following
day of the day corresponding to Fig. 8, are shown in Fig. 10.
Data (b) is the same as that in Fig. 8(b). Using a simple classi-
fication method based on only the threshold frequencies and
the flowchart shown in Fig. 11(a), we attempted to classify
the road surface into the three states. Table 1 shows the re-
sults, where the results of the other two methods of using the
indicator at 1.5 kHz and the peak frequency of the tire noise
spectrum are listed for comparison. Although the accuracy of
correct detection is low overall, the use of the indicator at 0.5
gives the highest accuracy, and the peak-frequency method
has the lowest accuracy. The main reason why relatively high
detection errors arise is that the road was covered with slushy
water at around 10 a.m. and was predicted to be dry in the
transition process from the snowy state to the wet state, as
shown in Fig. 9(b).
As is described in Sec. 2, a slushy surface is expediently
categorized into the wet state. Actual surfaces for such roads
765
 Table 1. Experimental results of detecting the road surface states over three days using 5-minute sound signals
Threshold values Accuracy [%]
Methods Dry Wet Snowy 1st day 2nd day 3rd day total (average)

Indicator at 1.5 kHz 0.32 ∼ 0.38 < 0.32 > 0.38 77.8 71.5 43.8 64.4
Indicator at 0.5 [kHz] 1.70 ∼ 2.07 > 2.07 < 1.7 75.4 93.7 50.0 73
Peak frequency [kHz] 0.61 ∼ 0.76 > 0.76 < 0.61 65.8 58.3 34.8 53.0

Table 2. Experimental results of detecting the road surface states over three days using 5-minute sound signals
Threshold values Accuracy
Frequency [kHz] Standard deviation: σt [Hz] [%]
Wet Snowy Dry Slushy 1st day 2nd day 3rd day Total (average)

> 2.07 < 1.70 < 151 > 151 79.5 95.8 66.7 80.7

Fig. 12. Flowchart for an advanced method of classify-
ing road surface states using the indicator frequency at
0.5. The information of the standard deviation is included
are not always covered with slush: i.e., parts of the surface
are still snowy and other parts are already dry owing to water
evaporation.
Additionally, not all vehicles pass over the slushy surfaces.
Figure 11(b) shows typical cumulative distributions for an
observation time of about 30 minutes. Four kinds of road
surfaces, wet, dry, snowy, and slushy states, are exhibited. It
is noted that the curves for the slushy road are more obvi-
ously scattered than the curves of the remaining three states,
particularly the curves of the dry state.
Therefore, it seems to be feasible to discriminate the dry
and slushy surfaces by introducing some statistical measures,
such as the standard deviation σ. The flowchart in Fig. 12 is
an advanced classification method that makes use of the sta-
tistical factor σ. Specifically, the value of σ for the indicator
at 0.5 was determined to be 151 Hz from one-hour data at
around 10 a.m. in Fig. 10(b).
Table 2 shows the results obtained using the advanced
classification method. It is already shown in Table 1 that
when the indicator at 0.5 takes a value between 1.7 kHz and
2.07 kHz, the road surface is either dry or slushy. In this case,
we use the standard deviation σ for judging the classification.
If σ < 151 Hz, the surface is dry. Otherwise, the surface is in
the slushy state. Table 1 reveals that the accuracy in classifi-
cation is improved by introducing the standard deviation.
6. Conclusions
We presented new methods for classifying road surface
conditions using only the tire sound noise emitted from mov-
ing vehicles. A couple of detection indicators were proposed:
the normalized magnitude at 1.5 kHz in the cumulative distri-
bution and the frequency at which the normalized magnitude
takes a value of 0.5. From various field experiments, it was
found that the two indicators have almost the same classifi-
cation accuracy. It was also demonstrated that averaging of
the noise data is important in order to extract distinct differ-
ences among various states of road surfaces. At the present
time, classification accuracy is, at most, 81%. However, the
accuray may be improved by incorporating the natural tran-
sition process and meteorological information such as road
temperature. Further studies concerning such problems are
under way.
(Manuscript received Nov. 13, 2008,
revised Feb. 21, 2009)
References
(1) A. Saegusa and Y. Fujiwara: “A Study on Forecasting Road Surface Condi-
tions Based on Weather and Road Surface Data”, IEICE Trans. INF. & SYST.,
Vol.E90-D, No.2, pp.509–516 (2007-2)
(2) K. McFall and T. Niittula: “Results of AV Winter Road Condition Sensor
Prototype”, The 11th Standing International Road Weather Commission in
Sapporo (2002-1)
(3) AerotechTelub and Dalarna University: “Final Report on Signal and Image
Processing for Road Condition Classification”, pp.1–30 (2002-2)
(4) T. Kubo, C. Shimomura, and T. Haruyama: “Discriminant Analysis System
for Winter Roads Utilizing Automobile Tire Sounds”, AIPCR·PIARC, The
12th International Winter Road Congress in Italy (2006-3)
(5) K. Ueda, K. Nakamura, H. Onodera, N. Konagai, and T. Kamakura: “De-
velopment of Road Condition Detecting Sensor Using Vehicle Running
Sounds”, The Papers of Technical Meeting on Intelligent Transport Systems,
IEE Japan, No.ITS-07-13, pp.25–30 (2007) (in Japanese)
(6) M. Yamada, K. Ueda, I. Horiba, and N. Sugie: “Discrimination of the Road
Condition Toward Understanding of Vehicle Driving Environments”, Intel-
ligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transaction, Vol.2, No.1, pp.26–31
(2001-3)

766 IEEJ Trans. IA, Vol.129, No.7, 2009


Wuttiwat Kongrattanaprasert (Student Member) received his
B. Eng degree in Electrical Engineering from
Rajamangala Institute of Technology, Thailand, in
May 1995. In March 2001, he received his
M. Eng degree in Electrical Engineering from
King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thon-
buri, Thailand. He is currently a PhD student of
Electronic Engineering at The University of Electro-
Communications (UEC), Japan. His research inter-
ests are in the detection of road surface conditions us-
ing tire noise from vehicles and nondestructive determination using force
vibration and ultrasound.
Hideyuki Nomura (Non-member) received his B. E., M. E., and
Dr. Eng. degrees in Electronic Engineering from
the University of Electro-Communications in 1996,
1998, and 2001, respectively. He was a Research
Associate at the Department of Information and Sys-
tems Engineering, Kanazawa University from 2001
to 2007. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the
Department of Electronic Engineering, the Univer-
sity of Electro-Communications. His current research
interests include computational acoustics, acoustical
electronics, and speech dynamics. He received the Awaya Prize ans the
Sato Prize from ASJ in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He is a member of
the Acoustical Society of Japan, the Acoustical Society of America, and the
Marine Acoustics Society of Japan.
電学論 D，129 巻 7 号，2009 年
Detection of Road Surface Conditions Using Tire Noise
Tomoo Kamakura (Non-member) received his B. E. degree from
Kanazawa University, and M. E. and Dr. E. degrees
from Nagoya University in 1971, 1973, and 1977,
respectively. He was an Associate Professor at the
Department of Electronics, the University of Electro-
Communications from 1985 to 1997. He is cur-
rently a Professor at the the University of Electro-
Communications. His current research interests in-
clude nonlinear acoustics, ultrasonic measurement,
and acoust-electronics. He received the Sato Prizes
from ASJ in 2003 and 2006, and received the best paper award from MASJ
in 2003. He is a member of the Acoustical Society of Japan, the Acoustical
Society of America, the Marine Acoustics Society of Japan, and the Institute
of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering.
Koji Ueda (Non-member) received B. E. and M. E. degrees in Elec-
trical Engineering from Meijo University in 1981 and
1988, respectively. Since 1981, he has been working
in Nagoya Electric Works, Co., Ltd. He is currently
a manager of the research and development division.
He received Dr. E. degree from Nagoya University in
1996. He is a member of the Information Process-
ing Society of Japan and the Institute of Electronics,
Information and Communication Engineering.
767