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Pothole Detection using Machine Learning

Conference Paper · February 2018

DOI: 10.14257/astl.2018.150.35

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 Advanced Science and Technology Letters
Vol.150 (AST 2018), pp.151-155
http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/astl.2018.150.35

Pothole Detection using Machine Learning

Hyunwoo Song, Kihoon Baek and Yungcheol Byun

Dept. of Computer Engineering, Jeju National University, Korea

chzhqk1994@gmail.com, masinogns@gmail.com, ycb@jejunu.ac.kr

Abstract. Pothole detection is import to decrease accidents across the world.

Many researches have been done but they require some specific devices or tools
to acquire sensor data. In this paper, we propose an hany way to implement
pothole detection using a smartphone, and classification is performed using
Transfer Learning. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach
provides us efficiency from the view point of implementation and performance.

Keywords: Pothole detection, Transfer Learning, Inception V3

1 Introduction and Related Works

The number of vehicles drastically increases every year, and the number of accidents
proportionally does too. The condition of road surface affects directly on our safety.
The American Automobile Association estimated in the five years prior to 2016 that
16 million drivers in the United States had suffered damage from potholes to their
vehicle with a cost of 3 billion USD a year[1]. In India, 3,000 people per year are
killed in accidents involving potholes. Britain has estimated that the cost of fixing all
roads with potholes in the country would cost 12 billion EURO[2].
According to the World Health Organization, road traffic injuries caused an
estimated 1.25 million deaths worldwide in the year 2010. That is, one person is killed
every 25 seconds. Only 28 countries, representing 449 million people (seven percent
of the world's population), have adequate laws that address all five risk factors (speed,
drunk driving, helmets, seat-belts and child restraints)[3].
By the way, there is close relationship between the accident and road condition
including a pothole. According to Austroads[4], road accidents occur as the result of
one, or more than one of the following factors: human factors, vehicle factors, road
and environment factors. Vogel and Bester[5] introduced risk factors (human, vehicle
and environment factors) for 14 accident types that can be used as a reference point to
determine the likely cause of an accident of a specific type. A research had been done
from a little bit different point of view, where the researchers proposed a cost-
effective solution to identify the potholes and humps on roads and provide timely
alerts to drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages. Ultrasonic sensors are used to
identify the potholes and humps[6].
A low cost model for analyzing 3D pavement images was proposed, which utilizes
a low cost Kinect sensor which gives the direct depth measurements, thereby reducing
computing costs[7]. Lin and Liu have proposed a method for pothole detection based

ISSN: 2287-1233 ASTL

Copyright © 2018 SERSC
Advanced Science and Technology Letters
Vol.150 (AST 2018)

on SVM (Support Vector Machine). This method distinguishes potholes from other
defects such as cracks. The images are segmented by using partial differential
equations. In order to detect potholes, the method trains the SVM with a set of
pavement images. However, the training model fails to detect the pavement defects if
the images are not properly illuminated[6][8].
In the previous researches, some specific devices and tools are needed to detect the
status of roads, which causes some extra costs and inconveniences. In this researches,
we introduce an efficient way to detect road distress using a mobile devices. Anybody
can install an app into his/her mobile to detect the status of roads.

2 Proposed Approach

Every movements should make different sensor values if we use some sensors
including gyroscope and accelerator. Fortunately, almost all of the recent mobile
smart phones have the two sensors, which is easy to handle and has advantages in the
cost and efficiency. Therefore, we utilize a smart phone as a sensor to acquire
movement information, and the sensed data will be fed into a classifier to detect the
status of a road. In this point, a classifier is one of the key component to implement a
successful system.

Fig. 1. Inception V3 and Transfer Learning

Can we utilize Inception V3 to a specific domain problem, which is one of the

well-known classifiers for classifying existing general items and objects including
TVs, vehicles, refrigerators, airplanes, and etc.? We tried to find the answer for this
question in this research. We use the existing knowledge in Inception V3 except the
final fully connected layer in it. They say it is Transfer Learning which gives us some
advantages in computation time and efficiency for recognition. Figure 1 shows that
what Transfer Learning means and which part of Inception V3 will be retrained.
The overall process for our approach includes (1) acquiring road status information
using gyroscope and accelerate sensors which is called logging, (2) data
preprocessing for Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN), that is, Inception V3. There

152 Copyright © 2018 SERSC

 Advanced Science and Technology Letters
Vol.150 (AST 2018)

are two steps: learning and testing. In learning step, the hyper parameters in fully-
connected layer is tuned using some portion of data, and test is performed using the
rest data to verify our proposed approach.

Fig. 2. An example of sensor data for a pothole (1 try)

Figure 2 shows an example actual data acquired for sensors which is captured
while passing over a pothole one time. We can see some number of oscillation in the
center area having high frequency for a pothole. Relatively low frequency on both
sides means a vehicle is passing over a flat path.

4 Experimental Results

To verify our proposed approach, we located some bumps and potholes we could
easily find around us to collect some sensor data. An Android app was implemented
to capture the data using Gyroscope and Accelerator sensors.

Table 1. Data description

Heading level Count Description
Normal 100
Pothole 100 Acquired from a
Bump 100 vehicle
Total 300

3 classes (types) of road status (normal, pothole, and bump) were considered and 5
real instances on a road were found. We collected 20 times of sensor data for each
instance, which makes 100 count of sensor data for each class. A total number of 300
number of data were collected finally as showed in Table 1.

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Advanced Science and Technology Letters
Vol.150 (AST 2018)

Fig. 3. The change of loss values during learning

To train our Convolutional Neural Networks, 70 percent of data (70 instances) for
each class separated. After 18,000 learning epochs, the loss value converged toward
almost zero, which means the learning process performed successfully. Finally, we
tested using the rest data, which is 30 percent of the original data (30 instances for
each class). All of the instances were recognized correctly showing 100% of
classification rate.

5 Conclusion and Future Works

In this paper, we proposed an efficient method to recognize a pothole on a road from

the viewpoint of cost and implementation. This is handy way because sensor data is
acquired using a smartphone everybody has nowadays. To make the implementation
easier, we utilized Inception V3 and Transfer Learning which gives us a very flexible
way for application. Interesting thing about this research is that general knowledge
works for a specific domain problem. That is, the knowledge acquired in Inception V3
to recognize common objects around us can be transferred to recognize a totally
difference signal patterns as we showed in previous session.
Meanwhile, the success of Transfer Learning is depend on the variety of data
which might change according to sort of vehicles, the shape of bump and pothole, and
etc. Many types and shapes means difficulty of learning, but big data will be helpful
to solve it. Also, not a general Inception V3 but a domain specific Convolutional
Neural Networks should be considered to handle the problem well.

Acknowledgments. This research was financially supported by The Project

Management Center Cultivating Smart Grid & Clean Energy Manpower (CK-1),
JNU.

References

1. Pothole Damage Costs U.S. Drivers $3 Billion Annually, https://www. oregon.aaa.com/

2016/02/pothole-damage-costs-u-s-drivers-3-billion-annually/. (2017)

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 Advanced Science and Technology Letters
Vol.150 (AST 2018)

2. Bad roads killed over 10k people in 2015; 3,416 deaths due to potholes. https://timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/india/Bad-roads-killed-over-10k-people-in-2015-3416-deaths-due-to-
potholes/articleshow/53482615.cms. (2015)
3. List of countries by traffic-related death rate. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate. (2018)
4. AUSTROADS, 1994. Road Safety Audit. Sydney (2006)
5. L. Vogel, C. J. Bester : A Relationship between accident types and causes. (1999)
6. Rajeshwari Madli, Santosh Hebbar, Praveenraj Pattar, and Varaprasad Golla : Automatic
Detection and Notification of Potholes and Humps on Roads to Aid Drivers. IEEE Sensor
Journal. VOL. 15, pp. 4313--4318. (2015)
7. I. Moazzam, K. Kamal, S. Mathavan, S. Usman, M. Rahman: Metrology and visualization
of potholes using the Microsoft Kinect sensor. Proc. 16th Int. IEEE Conf. Intell. Transp.
Syst, pp. 1284—1291. (2013)
8. J. Lin, Y. Liu : Potholes detection based on SVM in the pavement distress image. Proc. 9th
Int. Symp. Distrib. Comput. Appl. Bus. Eng. Sci., pp. 544—547. (2010)

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