Monitoring of road surface conditions is a critical
activity in transport infrastructure management. Many research
solutions have been proposed in order to automatically control
and check the quality of road surfaces. Most of them make
use of expensive sensors embedded in vehicles or mainly focus
on detection of specific anomalies during monitoring activity.In
this paper, we describe the design of a system for collaborative
monitoring of road surface quality. The overall architecture
encompasses the integration of a custom mobile application, a
georeferenced database system and a visualization front-end.
Road surface condition is summarized through a roughness
parameter computed using signal processing algorithms running
on mobile devices. The roughness values computed are subsequently
transmitted and stored into a back-end geographic
information system enabling processing of aggregated traces
and visualization of road conditions. The proposed approach
introduces a thoroughly integrated system suitable for monitoring
applications in a scalable, crowdsourcing collaborative setting.
