Distinction of winter road surface conditions using road surveillance camera

To prevent traffic accident, recognizing dangerous road surface conditions such as puddle and freezing are very important issue. Several methods to distinguish road surface condition have been suggested so far. However, there are only a few proposed methods for at night-time. In these systems, it needs special expensive equipment such as camera with polarizing lens, infrared detector or laser radar. Therefore, in this paper, we present a distinction method of road surface conditions of wet or snow by using only visible road surveillance camera at daytime and night-time. So, this system does not use special equipment. As a result, we are able to distinguish road surface condition with high accuracy at both daytime and night-time such as wet or snow.