Public Infrastructure
Crowdsensed road surface monitoring at state scale
A road network of roughly 589,000 km was monitored by manual photo-and-GPS reports: weeks to action, inconsistent data, and no way to separate genuine defects from ordinary vibration. We built a crowdsensing pipeline that reads smartphone accelerometer, GPS and camera data as vehicles drive, classifies the road surface it is travelling on, and distinguishes potholes from speed bumps and driver handling — the false-positive problem that makes accelerometer-based detection unreliable in the field. Smartphone imagery serves as the source of truth, so the models are retrained against evidence rather than assumption.
- Focus
- Deep learning (CNN, LSTM, reservoir computing), crowdsensing, computer vision
- Engagement
- Proof of concept and MVP — a PWA, live at machinelearnspothole.site
- Outcome
- 93% accuracy on pothole and surface classification, with an imagery-backed retraining loop