English

Detecting Road Surface Wetness from Audio: A Deep Learning Approach

Machine Learning 2015-12-07 v2 Neural and Evolutionary Computing Sound

Abstract

We introduce a recurrent neural network architecture for automated road surface wetness detection from audio of tire-surface interaction. The robustness of our approach is evaluated on 785,826 bins of audio that span an extensive range of vehicle speeds, noises from the environment, road surface types, and pavement conditions including international roughness index (IRI) values from 25 in/mi to 1400 in/mi. The training and evaluation of the model are performed on different roads to minimize the impact of environmental and other external factors on the accuracy of the classification. We achieve an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 93.2% across all vehicle speeds including 0 mph. The classifier still works at 0 mph because the discriminating signal is present in the sound of other vehicles driving by.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.07035,
  title  = {Detecting Road Surface Wetness from Audio: A Deep Learning Approach},
  author = {Irman Abdić and Lex Fridman and Erik Marchi and Daniel E Brown and William Angell and Bryan Reimer and Björn Schuller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07035},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Under review in IEEE Signal Processing Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:51:34.135Z