On-Board Smartphone-Based Road Hazard Detection with Cloud-Based Fusion

Road hazards are one of the significant sources of fatalities in road accidents. The accurate estimation of road hazards can ensure safety and enhance the driving experience. Existing methods of road condition monitoring are time-consuming, expensive, inefficient, require much human effort, and need to be regularly updated. There is a need for a flexible, cost-effective, and efficient process to detect road conditions, especially road hazards. This work presents a new method to deal with road hazards using smartphones. Since most of the population drives cars with smartphones on board, we aim to leverage this to detect road hazards more flexibly, cost-effectively, and efficiently. This paper proposes a cloud-based deep-learning road hazard detection model based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to detect different types of road hazards from the motion data. To address the issue of large data requests for deep learning, this paper proposes to leverage both simulation data and experimental data for the learning process. To address the issue of misdetections from an individual smartphone, we propose a cloud-based fusion approach to further improve detection accuracy. The proposed approaches are validated by experimental tests, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of road hazard detection.