Applying Wavelet Packet Decomposition and One-Class Support Vector Machine on Vehicle Acceleration Traces for Road Anomaly Detection

Road condition monitoring through real-time intelligent systems has become more and more significant due to heavy road transportation. Road conditions can be roughly divided into normal and anomaly segments. The number of former should be much larger than the latter for a useable road. Based on the nature of road condition monitoring, anomaly detection is applied, especially for pothole detection in this study, using accelerometer data of a riding car. Accelerometer data were first labeled and segmented, after which features were extracted by wavelet packet decomposition. A classification model was built using one-class support vector machine. For the classifier, the data of some normal segments were used to train the classifier and the left normal segments and all potholes were for the testing stage. The results demonstrate that all 21 potholes were detected reliably in this study. With low computing cost, the proposed approach is promising for real-time application.