Effect of wheel balancing on tyre condition monitoring system using vibration signals through statistical features and machine learning techniques

Tyre condition monitoring system (TCMS) is an emerging electronic safety system present in most of the new generation vehicles. It is intended to warn the driver when wheels are unbalanced or inflation pressure in a tyre goes below a certain recommended value. In India only limited vehicles having this critical safety system installed because it is highly expensive. The existing TCMS monitor only the tyre pressure using direct or indirect methods. In recent days the indirect TCMS using vibration signals and machine learning techniques are gaining momentum. This paper reports the effect of wheel balancing on a proposed affordable indirect TCMS. The present study goes one step forward to include the wheel balancing in the TCMS, thus increasing the scope of TCMS. The study was carried out using vibration signal data acquired from a low cost accelerometer placed on the wheel hub. The features required were taken out from the acquired data with the help of statistical feature extraction techniques. Features selection and feature classification were processed with J48 decision tree algorithm. The effect of wheel balancing in classification accuracy is clearly explained.