On the analysis of road surface conditions using embedded smartphone sensors

Road conditions play a critical role in ensuring traffic safety and reducing traffic jams and congestions. Ensuring healthy conditions require constant monitoring to detect and predict potential road deterioration. This work proposes a low-cost solution that takes advantage of sensory capabilities of smartphones. By recording Gyro rotation sensor data, we show that abnormalities can be detected by calculating the second moment of sensor data. Our work is validated by drive tests that show results are consistent and repeatable. The work also proposed a dynamic time warping technique to measure similarity between drive results and to obtain accurate representation of multiple drives data.