Toward a mobile crowdsensing system for road surface assessment

Road surface roughness assessment plays an important role in transportation infrastructure management. Many approaches have been proposed to assess road surface conditions, however, most of these are either labor-intensive tasks or make use of specialized and expensive instruments. The concept of “citizen sensing”, which takes advantages of the sensor-rich smartphones, has been employed by scientists because of its low-cost and high-efficiency. This paper presents a novel crowdsensing-based system for road surface assessment using smartphones. The built-in GPS receiver and an accelerometer in smartphones are utilized to capture a spatial series of the geo-referenced Z-axis accelerations of the road surface, which are used to compute two assessment indexes that aid in determining the road quality. Field tests of the proposed system demonstrate that the condition of the road surface can be effectively identified and the transient events can be properly detected and located by mining the crowd sensed data. •A mobile crowdsensing system for road surface assessment is proposed.•The built-in GPS and accelerometer are used to capture geo-referenced accelerations, which correspond to the road surface.•The proposed system could efficiently identify and locate bumps/potholes with a positioning accuracy of 5-10 meters.•The proposed system could accurately describe road surface condition with the proposed indexes.