Road Weather Management Program
photos of lightning, trucks plowing snow, an empty road before a storm, and an evacuation
Office of Operations 21st century operations using 21st century technologies

Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

Winter Road Condition Recognition using Video Image Classification

Abstract:

In Sweden decisions about what winter maintenance are made, in part, based on data received from road weather information stations, some of which are also equipped with video cameras. These video cameras form an additional unexploited sensor for determining the road condition during winter. Images taken from a handheld roadside video camera are investigated here to see if it is possible to determine the road state (dry, wet, snowy, icy, snowy with tracks) from the video images alone. The system is intended to supplement the other weather station measurements, such as temperature and wind speed, and make better maintenance decisions and quality control of maintenance possible. The results indicate that it is possible to distinguish between all road states except for ice/wet and ice/tracks.

Source(s):

77th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Center for Research on Transportation and Society (Sweden), Transportation Research Record No. 1627. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 1998

Author:

Kuehnle, Burghout

Keywords:


Pavement condition
Winter maintenance
Snow
Ice/Frost

PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.

Office of Operations