Learning from the crowd: Road infrastructure monitoring system

The condition of the road infrastructure has severe impacts on the road safety, driving comfort, and on the rolling resistance. Therefore, the road infrastructure must be monitored comprehensively and in regular intervals to identify damaged road segments and road hazards.
Methods have been developed to comprehensively and automatically digitize the road infrastructure and estimate the road quality, which are based on vehicle sensors and a supervised machine learning classification. Since different types of vehicles have various suspension systems with different response functions, one classifier cannot be taken over to other vehicles. Usually, a high amount of time is needed to acquire training data for each individual vehicle and classifier.
To address this problem, the methods to collect training data automatically for new vehicles based on the comparison of trajectories of untrained and trained vehicles have been developed. The results show that the method based on a k-dimensional tree and Euclidean distance performs best and is robust in transferring the information of the road surface from one vehicle to another. Furthermore, this method offers the possibility to merge the output and road infrastructure information from multiple vehicles to enable a more robust and precise prediction of the ground truth.