An Artificial Neural Network approach to assess road roughness using smartphone-based crowdsourcing data

Monitoring road surface conditions is a crucial task for road authorities to develop effective infrastructure maintenance programs. Despite smartphones have been introduced as cost-effective and real-time solution for this purpose, several challenges must be addressed before their real-world application. This study investigates the utilization of smartphone-based crowdsourcing data and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to enhance the precision of road surface condition estimation. Initially, data are collected from four different smartphone models mounted in various vehicles, including vertical acceleration, geographic location, and speed. The root mean square of the vertical acceleration data, along with vehicle speed, is then employed as input features for the ANN, while the true International Roughness Index (IRI) values serve as the corresponding output features. Comparative analysis between ANN and regression models based on statistical metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Pearson correlation revealed that ANN outperforms regression models. The obtained MSE and Pearson correlation values for ANN (0.56 and 0.91) surpass those of regression models (0.72 and 0.88). Moreover, results indicated that utilizing crowdsourcing smartphone data yielded superior outcomes compared to using a single smartphone for this purpose.