Automated Detection of Dry and Water-Filled Potholes Using Multimodal Sensing System

Indian roads are full of potholes and during monsoon season the potholes are lled with water. This makes it dicult for the driver to drive upon the potholed roads. So its crucial to detect water-lled potholes. Dry pothole detection has already been done using sound waves. Detection of water-lled potholes is harder. The sound waves from the ultrasonic sensor will not penetrate the water surface due to impedance mismatch of air and water. So to detect the water-lled potholes a laser beam based system is used. The frequency of the laser beam which can detect water-lled potholes need to be used. The wavelength in the range of 400 nm to 450 nm which has less absorption in water is used. This range is blue light which is least attenuated in water. So a multimodal sensing system is designed to detect both dry and water-lled potholes

Laser-based detection and depth estimation of dry and water-filled potholes: A geometric approach

In secondary Indian roads, one often encounters potholes which can be either dry or water-filled. Accordingly, to ensure safe driving, it is imperative to detect potholes and estimate their depths in either condition. In this paper, we develop a physics-based geometric framework, where such detection and depth-estimation can be accomplished using suitable laser. Specifically, we relate dry pothole depth to measured optical deviation using simple ray optics. Further, we use Snell's law of refraction to obtain a quartic equation, and its appropriate real root to relate water-filled pothole depth to the corresponding optical deviation. Here we take into account diminishing resolu- tion with increasing distance from the camera. We conclude by experimentally validating our method