Road Friction Estimation for Connected Vehicles using Supervised Machine Learning

In this paper, the problem of road friction prediction from a fleet of connected vehicles is investigated. A framework is proposed to predict the road friction level using both historical friction data from the connected cars and data from weather stations, and comparative results from different methods are presented. The problem is formulated as a classification task where the available data is used to train three machine learning models including logistic regression, support vector machine, and neural networks to predict the friction class (slippery or non-slippery) in the future for specific road segments. In addition to the friction values, which are measured by moving vehicles, additional parameters such as humidity, temperature, and rainfall are used to obtain a set of descriptive feature vectors as input to the classification methods. The proposed prediction models are evaluated for different prediction horizons (0 to 120 minutes in the future) where the evaluation shows that the neural networks method leads to more stable results in different conditions.Comment: Published at IV 201

Audio Surveillance of Roads:A System for Detecting Anomalous Sounds

In the last decades, several systems based on video analysis have been proposed for automatically detecting accidents on roads to ensure a quick intervention of emergency teams. However, in some situations, the visual information is not sufficient or sufficiently reliable, whereas the use of microphones and audio event detectors can significantly improve the overall reliability of surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting road accidents by analyzing audio streams to identify hazardous situations such as tire skidding and car crashes. Our method is based on a two-layer representation of an audio stream: at a low level, the system extracts a set of features that is able to capture the discriminant properties of the events of interest, and at a high level, a representation based on a bag-of-words approach is then exploited in order to detect both short and sustained events. The deployment architecture for using the system in real environments is discussed, together with an experimental analysis carried out on a data set made publicly available for benchmarking purposes. The obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.</p