Trigger-Based Pothole Detection Using Smartphone and OBD-II

Abstract

Maintenance of road infrastructure has gathered a lot of attention in recent days. Bad road conditions often cause damages to vehicles and passengers that cannot be neglected. Some of the major factors that cause damage are potholes, speed-breakers, uneven patches etc. The presence of such abnormalities also affects ride quality and safety of passengers. The paper describes a low-cost method that employs a smartphone and an OBD-II module to detect and locate potholes on roads. It utilizes vision data, sensor data and OBD data to create and validate triggers caused by potholes. The image-triggered and data-triggered methods proposed recognize potholes on roads and create a trigger through image/video processing and data processing respectively. The results obtained from each method is cross validated by the other method that help in evaluating ride quality based on road conditions.