Road condition discrimination using weather data and camera images

An intelligent way of determining the road condition is needed to perform an effective road maintenance that results in high accessibility of the road network and high traffic safety. The hypothesis is that data from existing meteorological sensors and camera images from Road Weather information Systems (RWiS) could be used to improve the road condition classification. Previous research has found that an image analysis alone can estimate the road condition. This paper aims to evaluate if an extensive dataset retrieved from a RWiS site is sufficient to give a more accurate road condition classification than one obtained with an image analysis alone. The study reveals that RWiS data gives additional information for discrimination of the road conditions compared to image analysis only.