Evaluating features and classifiers for road weather condition analysis

Weather-dependent road conditions are a major factor in many automobile incidents; computer vision algorithms for automatic classification of road conditions can thus be of great benefit. This paper presents a system for classification of road conditions using still-frames taken from an uncalibrated dashboard camera. The problem is challenging due to variability in camera placement, road layout, weather and illumination conditions. The system uses a prior distribution of road pixel locations learned from training data then fuses normalized luminance and texture features probabilistically to categorize the segmented road surface. We attain an accuracy of 80% for binary classification (bare vs. snow/ice-covered) and 68% for 3 classes (dry vs. wet vs. snow/ice-covered) on a challenging dataset, suggesting that a useful system may be viable.