Winter road surface condition classification using convolutional neural network (CNN): visible light and thermal image fusion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During winter, road conditions play a crucial role in traffic flow efficiency and road safety. Icy, snowy, slushy, and wet road conditions reduce tire friction and affect vehicle stability which could lead to dangerous crashes. To keep traffic operations safe, cities spend a significant budget on winter maintenance operations such as snow plowing and spreading of salt and sand. This paper proposes a methodology for automated winter road surface condition classification using convolutional neural network (CNN) and the combination of thermal and visible light cameras. As part of this research, 4244 pairs of visible light and thermal images are captured from pavement surfaces and classified into snowy, icy, wet, and slushy surface conditions. Two single-stream CNN models (visible light and thermal streams) and one dual-stream CNN model are developed. The average F1-Score of dual-stream model is 0.866, 0.935, 0.985, and 0.888 on snowy, icy, wet, and slushy, respectively. The weighted average F1-Score is 0.94.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".