Detection of Road Surface Anomaly Using Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing

Road surface condition can significantly impact the interaction between vehicles and pavement structure, which may even cause high fuel consumption and safety issues of drivers and vehicles. Distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) technology is a useful tool to perform continuous and real-time monitoring of traffic and road surface condition. However, it is challenging to process the data for the purpose of road anomaly detection. The study proposed two approaches to detect the road anomaly using DFOS. In the first method, local binary pattern (LBP) histograms were used to extract the features of the images with and without road anomaly, and support vector machine (SVM) combined with principal component analysis (PCA) was adopted as the classifier. The convolutional neural network (CNN) was applied on the binary classification data to analyze the images in the second method. The accuracy and benefits of two methodologies were compared. The vehicle speed was estimated by detecting lines using Hough transform. The feasibility of road anomaly detection using DFOS is proved.