Multi-Lane Pothole Detection from Crowdsourced Undersampled Vehicle Sensor Data

As smart vehicles have become more ubiquitous, the capability now exists to detect environmental road features (e.g., potholes, road incline angle, etc.) from their embedded sensor data. By aggregating data from multiple vehicles, crowdsourcing can be leveraged to detect environmental information with improved accuracy. We focus on using such data to detect and localize potholes on multi-lane roads. Extracting information from aggregated vehicle data is challenging due to undersampling sensors, sensor mobility, asynchronous sensor operation, sensor noise, vehicle and road heterogeneity, and GPS position error. GPS position error is particularly problematic in multi-lane environments since the position error is generally larger than standard lane widths. In this paper, we investigate these issues and develop a crowdsourced system to detect and localize potholes in multi-lane environments using accelerometer data from embedded vehicle sensors. Our crowdsourced system reduces the required network bandwidth by determining road incline and bank angle information in each vehicle to filter acceleration components that do not correspond to pothole conditions. We evaluate our system on simulated and real-world data, analyze tradeoffs in the number of vehicles and the amount of bandwidth required for accurate detection, and compare the results to the simpler single lane detection scenario.