Classification of road conditions: From camera images and weather data

It is important to correctly determine road condition as it contains essential information for improving traffic safety. Knowledge about the road condition is used by maintenance personnel as a trigger for snow removal and deicing tasks. The presence of severe road conditions is also communicated as warnings and speed reduction recommendations to road users. Previous research shows that road images and data from Road Weather information Systems (RWiS) give enough information to identify road conditions, such as dry, wet, snowy, icy and tracks. The hypothesis of the new model was that it should be possible to develop a model that could classify road conditions from existing RWiS road weather data and road images. This paper proposes a model that gives a correct classification of the road conditions dry, wet, snowy and icy at an accuracy rate of 91% to 100%.