Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Acoustics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apacoust

Technical note

Road surface prediction from acoustical measurements in the tire cavity

using support vector machine q
Johannes Masino a,1,⇑, Julien Pinay a,1, Markus Reischl b, Frank Gauterin a
a
Institute of Vehicle System Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 761131 Karlsruhe, Germany
b
Institute for Applied Computer Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Traffic noise has large consequences on the appreciation of the living quality close to roads and leads to
Received 19 September 2016 speech interference, sleep disturbances, and general annoyance. Furthermore, it impacts the economy as
Received in revised form 28 March 2017 it increases the costs for noise abatement and decreases the value of properties, which are close to noisy
Accepted 30 March 2017
road transport infrastructure. However, existing methods to measure tire/road noise lack in mobility, in
the possibility of measuring comprehensively, and are expensive and sophisticated to use.
We present a novel method and an exploitation model to predict different types of road surfaces based
Keywords:
on tire cavity sound acquired under normal vehicle operation. With the information of the road surface,
Tire cavity sound
Acoustic signal processing
further parameters can be estimated, such as tire/road noise, tire/road friction or rolling resistance. Our
Support vector machine method can be applied comprehensively and is inexpensive. In contrast to special measurement vehicles
Road surface classification with laser profilometers, normal vehicles can be equipped with our measurement system and the data
Tire/road noise can be automatically analyzed with our method. Therefore, the road infrastructure can not only be mon-
Feature selection and aggregation itored in fixed intervals of about one to four years but constantly.
We tested our classifier with unseen data, which were not used for training. Our final classifier after
post-processing has an average precision and recall of respectively 95.1 and 90.6% and a accuracy of
91.8%.
The output of our model could be fused with other parameters such as weather data, to create a digital
map to automatically identify noisy roads or dangerous spots with low tire road friction. This might be an
important input for advanced driver assistance systems. Based on the detected road hazards, an optimal
regulation of the vehicle speed could be achieved. For the civil engineering departments and road infras-
tructure operators, this tool could be used to perform a more efficient maintenance of the whole road
infrastructure.
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Traffic noise has large consequences on the appreciation of the
living quality close to roads [1–3]. Researches have analyzed the
impact of traffic noise on health and found relationships between
the level of transportation noise and speech interference, sleep dis-
turbances, and general annoyance [4]. Results from previous stud-
ies suggest, that there is a positive correlation between long-term
exposure to road traffic noise and the risk for cardiovascular dis-
eases [5], hypertension [6] and myocardial infarction [7]. Further-
more, a high level of traffic noise impacts the economy as it
q
Data and MATLAB code can be find on http://bit.ly/2oTdFuh
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: johannes.masino@kit.edu (J. Masino).
1
Both authors equally contributed to this work.
increases the costs for noise abatement and decreases the value
of properties, which are close to noisy road transport infrastructure
[8]. For example, studies found discounts for houses and lands of
12–30% [9,10].
Traffic noise is composed of many noise sources. Among them
can be cited engine and power-train noise, aerodynamic turbu-
lence, noise caused by the exhaust system or brake squealing.
However, it was demonstrated that nowadays, tire/road noise
induces the major part of traffic noise not only above 40 km/h,
but in all driving conditions [11]. With the increasing popularity
of electromobility and the decreasing proportion of the engine as
traffic noise source, tire/road noise becomes even more important.
Researches have analyzed the interaction of the tire and the
road surface, e.g. [12,13]. They found that the emitted tire/road
noise strongly correlates with the road profile or geometry speci-
fics and that the road surface texture has a great influence on the

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2017.03.018
0003-682X/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
42 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48
Nomenclature
Acronyms
2PA twin layer porous asphalt
AR autoregressive
CPB Controlled-Pass-By
CPX Close-Proximity
EAC exposed aggregate concrete
LDA linear discriminant analysis
tire/road noise, such as the sound pressure level or sonority [14]. It
also influences the comfort perception of the driver and has to be
taken into account during the tire development and the develop-
ment of new road coverings [15,16]. In the second German national
noise protection program it was fixed that between 2008 and 2020
the traffic noise in Germany should be reduced by at least 5 dB(A)
[17]. For example, many countries installed porous asphalt, known
as ‘whispering asphalt‘ in Germany, ‘pervious macadam‘ in the
United Kingdom, or ‘drain asphalt‘ in France, which reduced the
level of tire/road noise by up to 10 dB(A) [18]. However, there is
still a large inventory of noisy road surfaces, which have to be
identified.
1.1. Relevant work
Today, two methods are mainly used to analyze and quantify
tire-road noise, namely the Controlled-Pass-By (CPB) method and
the Close-Proximity (CPX) method. CPX is a method based on
test-tire rolling on the road or on a test-track surface with measur-
ing microphones located close to the tire surface, as defined in ISO/
DIS 11819-2.2. With the CPX method, the average A-weighted
sound pressure level emitted by two or four specified reference
tires is measured over an arbitrary or a specified road distance,
together with the vehicle testing speed. These data are collected
by at least two microphones, which are located close to the tires.
The CPB method is based on the determination of the maximum
A-weighted SPL during the run of a test vehicle on the asphalt
pavement. Microphones are placed at a defined distance from the
vehicle path at the side of the roadway. In Europe, the ISO Standard
11819-1 calls for placing microphones 7.5 m from the center of the
vehicle lane at a height of 1.2 m above the pavement.
However, existing methods to measure tire/road noise lack in
mobility, in the possibility of measuring comprehensively, and
are expensive and sophisticated to use. Bschorr developed a new
method to quantify tire/road noise in 1981 [19], namely the tire
cavity sound measurement method. The road texture induces tire
vibrations and the idea behind the method is to measure the sound
in the tire cavity with an acoustic sensor. Recent studies found a
good correlation of the tire cavity sound and tire/road noise [20].
Furthermore, researchers have analyzed the reproducibility of
measurements and the influence of different parameters, such as
tire pressure, temperature, and load [21,22]. Since the tire cavity
is a reverberation room, it is insulated from the environment and
measurements are not disturbed by any unwanted noises, such
as wind, other vehicle noise, or reflection phenomena due to
nearby buildings. That means, that measurements can take place
in the moving traffic and data can be acquired under normal vehi-
cle operation and comprehensively. Existing prototypes of the tire
cavity sound measurement system are expensive and not applica-
ble for field operational tests and for an automatic data acquisition.
However, we further developed the system and overcame the dis-
advantages of existing prototypes [23].
MALN mastic asphalt – low noise
MANOVA multivariate analysis of variance
PSD power spectral density
SMA stone mastic asphalt
SVM support vector machine
TOP thin overlay paved on spray seal, hot on hot
1.2. Our contribution
This paper presents a novel method and an exploitation model,
which enhances the differences between different road texture
cavity sounds and allows via classification for an automatic recog-
nition of the road texture based on its tire cavity sound character-
istics. Therefore, our presented method closes a gap in the
literature. Furthermore, we present methods to process the tire
cavity signal and to analyze the most important characteristics of
the signal to predict the road surface type. The road surface has
not only a huge influence on the tire/road noise, but also on the
tire/road friction or rolling resistance and other important param-
eters for automotive engineering. It is therefore essential to esti-
mate the road surface comprehensively, which is now possible
with our presented method. The output of our model could be
fused with other parameters, such as weather data, to create a dig-
ital map to automatically identify noisy roads or dangerous spots
with low tire/road friction. This might be an important input for
advanced driver assistance systems. Based on detected road haz-
ards, an optimal regulation of the vehicle speed could be achieved.
For the civil engineering departments and road infrastructure
operators, this tool could be used to perform a more efficient main-
tenance of the whole road infrastructure. Furthermore, our study
might be helpful for other researchers, who process acoustic data
and face classification problems.
2. Measurement system
The data analyzed in this paper were acquired with a self-
developed tire cavity sound measurement system [20]. The
method and the system are schematized in Fig. 1. The texture of
the road leads to a displacement of the tire carcass, which induces
a noise field into the tire torus. As the sound absorption is low, the
tire cavity can be considered as a reverberant room. It can thus be
deduced that the sound field is homogeneous and can be measured
by only one acoustic sensor. The sound pressure level in the tire
cavity can be higher than 150 dB with reference value 20 l Pa [19].
The acoustic sensor (PCB 103B02) of our system can measure
sound pressure levels up to 180.3 dB with reference value
20 l Pa, has a frequency range of 50–5000 Hz, a sensitivity of
0.218 mV/Pa, a resolution of 77 dB, and an integrated acceleration
compensation. The air pressure sensor (Keller Serie 7) has a sensi-
tivity of 20 mV/bar and a measuring range of
10 to +10 bar. The
temperature sensor (Keller Serie 7) has a sensitivity of 4 mV/ C
and measures temperatures from
35 to 120  C. The data acquisi-
tion device (NI 9234) has four channels with a sample rate of
61.2 kHz and a resolution of 24 bit. It also provides a constant-
current regulated DC voltage source for the integrated circuit
piezoelectric acoustic sensor. The GPS system (Hemisphere A100
Smart Antenna) has a sample rate of 10 Hz and a resolution of less
than 0.6 m in a 0.95 confidence interval. The sample rate for the
 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48 43

100

80

Passing by mass (percent)

60

40

Fig. 1. The acoustic sensor measures the sound pressure inside the tire cavity and
additional sensors measure the static pressure and temperature as control
variables. The sensors are connected to a data acquisition system attached to the
rim flange, which transmits the data to a Car-PC. The tire carcass is excited through
the road surface texture, which influences the tire cavity sound, measured with the
acoustic sensor.
analogue to digital conversion of the acoustic sensor was set to
25,600 Hz to enable frequency analysis up to 12,800 Hz [24].
The sensors and the data acquisition device were attached to a
Rondell 0048 – 7.5  16 wheel rim with a Uniroyal TigerPaw SRTT
255/60R16 98H tire. The measurements were performed with a
Mercedes-Benz W220 1999 model on different road surfaces on
main roads and highways in Germany, listed in Table 1. The vehicle
speed during the experiment was 17 m/s, the pressure and temper-
ature in the tire cavity were constant and the weather conditions
were similar for all test drives.
3. Road surfaces
2PA
20 EAC
TOP
MALN
SMA
0
0 2 4 6 8 10
Sieve size (mm)
Fig. 2. Grain size distribution of investigated road surfaces. The data come from
different asphalt manufacturers and are sometimes subject to deviation due to the
range values given in the norm DIN EN 13108. However, they give a good
approximation of the common mixture used and thus to the roughness of the
surface. For the 2PA, the curve for a single-layered porous asphalt 8 has been
displayed, as it is the common construction method for the upper layer. The curve
representing the EAC is for a standardized A18 mixture according to DIN 1045-2.
cavity. In contrast, 2PA are coarse road surfaces with large open
cavities to reduce air pumping and horn effect. It might produce
a higher excitation of the tire structure and results in a higher level
of sound pressure in the tire torus.
The measurements to acquire the tire cavity sound pressure sig-
nal on the described road surfaces were conducted on 10 different
segments of German main roads and highways, which are listed in
Table 1.

We include five different types of road surfaces in our analysis,

4. Time series representation for road surface classification
which are mainly installed on the German road infrastructure:
stone mastic asphalt (SMA), thin overlay paved on spray seal, hot
4.1. Power spectral density calculations
on hot (TOP), mastic asphalt – low noise (MALN), twin layer porous
asphalt (2PA), and exposed aggregate concrete (EAC). They all dif-
To enable an automatic recognition of different road surfaces,
fer in their appearances and characteristics, such as color, rough-
distinction criteria have to be found. As this is hardly possible in
ness, void content, composition, surface structure, geometry,
the time domain, an analysis in the frequency domain has to take
drainage, friction and rolling resistance. A good characterization
place. This will be done through a computation of the power spec-
of a road surface composition is the mass percentage along the
tral density (PSD) of the acoustic signal. This data analysis is per-
grain size of the top layer, as shown in Fig. 2 for all road surface
formed with Matlab and it has to be computationally efficient in
types encountered in this study. TOP and MALN coverings have
order to enable online calculations. Secondly, the differences
approximately the same grain size distribution, which can be qual-
between the PSD estimate has to be maximized according to the
ified as finer. A smoother road might less excite the tire carcass,
road texture the measurement was realized on to enable a good
which might result in a lower total sound pressure level in the tire
classification. To perform spectral analysis of signals, two theories
are mainly used:
Table 1
Overview of measurement locations.  The Fourier theory
Name, KM Position, travel Pavement Construction  The autoregressive (AR) spectral estimation
stone direction type year
A9, 515 + 080 Eching, north 2PA 2005 Fourier-based techniques are widely used in order to perform
B17, 16 + 370 Stadtbergen, north 2PA 2010 spectral analysis of time series because of its efficiency and its
B2, 14 + 460 Stettenhofen, north SMA 2003 easy-to-use. However, these methods have their shortcomings,
B2, 21 + 240 Meitingen, north SMA 2005 such as leakage and the poor spectral resolution, especially when
A8W, 23 + 060 Lukka, southeast EAC 2010
A8W, 27 + 500 Hadersried, northwest EAC 2010
short-time frames are used [25]. Another possibility of performing
A96, 168 + 250 Blumenau, east TOP 2010 spectral analysis is to fit the times series with an AR model driven
A80, 46 + 680 Bad Aibling, east MALN 2009 by a white noise signal. This AR spectral analysis has been mainly
A80, 47 + 570 Eulenauer Filz, east MALN 2009 used because of its better spectral resolution for short frames of
A80, 54 + 500 Call pillar, east TOP 2009
data [26].
44 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48

Table 2 130
Retained PSD estimate methods in this study.
Yule-Walker
Fourier-based AR-based Burg
120
Welch
Welch method Burg method
Covariance method

Power spectral density (dB/Hz)

110
Modified covariance method
Yule-Walker method
100

Table 2 depicts the five methods that were retained for PSD 90
calculation.
The AR methods tend to adequately describe spectra of ‘‘peaky” 80
data, i.e. data whose PSD is large at certain frequencies. During the
development of the tire torus measurement system, it has been
70
shown that the signal in the tire torus is dominated by the torus
resonances, and can thus be qualified as ‘‘peaky” [23].
For each measurement file, the PSD was computed and the 60
computation time was recorded for each calculation. The results
100 200 400 800 1,600 3,200
are summarized in Table 3. Frequency (Hz)
It has been noticed that the more the power will be concen-
trated in the torus resonances (around 220 Hz and its many har- Fig. 3. Comparison of Yule-Walker, Burg and Welch PSD estimate for 2PA.
monics), the easier it would be to find patterns on the PSD
curves to distinguish a pavement from another. As can be seen in
Fig. 3, the acoustic power is more spread over the frequencies for
2PA
the Welch method. There is also a transition point which some- 120 SMA
times appears between the first two torus resonances (around MALN
300 Hz) with this method. This might complicate the automatic
Power spectral density (dB/Hz)

feature extraction needed for the following statistical analysis.

These problems are not present with either the Yule-Walker or 100
Burg PSD estimate methods. This is why the Welch method was
ruled out. As illustrated by Fig. 3, the two remaining methods gives
identical PSD estimates. In the end, the Yule-Walker method was
80
kept because of its computational efficiency.

4.2. Power spectral density features 60

Once the PSD estimates have been calculated, the acoustical

power distribution of the different road surfaces can be analyzed
over the frequencies. A first indication is the total power, computed 40
100 200 400 800 1,600 3,200 6,400 12,800
from the area under the PSD curve. As could be expected, the Frequency(Hz)
roughest pavement type (2PA) produces the highest acoustic
power with 140.41 dB. The lowest acoustic power is measured Fig. 4. Comparison of PSD estimates for 2PA, SMA and MALN pavements.
on TOP coverings with 138.11 dB. It can be deduced that the loud-
est signals correspond to 2PA pavements. However, the overall
power of the other roads oscillates between 138.11 and criterion. It can then be concluded that a different road surface will
139.55 dB so other distinction criteria are needed. It can be seen lead to a different power distribution over the frequencies. The
from Fig. 4 that the power within the torus resonances differs with rough 2PA coverings will strongly excite the low-frequency reso-
the road surface type. The power of the first torus resonance (i.e. nances of the torus whereas the SMA pavements will lead to a
the power between the two minima surrounding the first torus high-frequency broadband noise. In Section 5.1, we present a
resonance) was therefore isolated through band filters with mov- method explaining how to select the best features, which enable
ing cutting frequencies. Other bandpass filters with fixed cutting a good distinction between the different pavement types. In the
frequencies were used to compute the power of the first two torus end, twelve features were retained for the following statistical
resonances peaks (between 190 and 250 Hz, and between 400 and analysis.
470 Hz) and the first two torus resonance valleys (between 250 Total acoustical power in dB; Power between 100 and 5000 Hz
Power above 5000 Hz
and 400 Hz, and between 470 and 605 Hz). It can be also easily in dB; Power above 5000 Hz in dB; Total acoustical power
in %;
seen from Fig. 4 that the high-frequency power (above 5000 Hz) Power of second octave
Power between 100 and 5000 Hz
in %; Power of second octave
Total acoustical power
in %, First torus reso-
is much more intensive with 110.81 dB on SMA surfaces than on nance power with moving bandpass filter in dB;
2PA or MALN surfaces with 101.46 and 102.42 dB respectively. Power of first torus resonance peak
Total acoustical power
in %; First resonance peak power in dB,
The power over 5,000 Hz was therefore used as distinction

Table 3
Computation time of selected PSD estimate methods.

PSD estimate method Burg Covariance Modified covariance Yule-Walker Welch

Computation time (s) 2.9 21.6 43.5 0.1 1.2
 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48 45

Second resonance peak power in dB; First resonance valley power
in dB; Second resonance valley power in dB.
5. Classification of road surfaces
Our goal is to find a function f X , which returns the type of road
surface based on the time series representation of the tire cavity
sound. Therefore, we use a training set with our PSD features
labeled with the type of road surface to automatically find a func-
tion with a good generalization. With this function we can predict
measurement data, which were not used for training or which will
be acquired in the future. A support vector machine (SVM) is a
model to find such a function [27]. It is known as a top performer
and it finds a global optimum, maximizes the generalization abil-
ity, is robust to outliers, and is geometrically explicable [28]. The
disadvantages are, that a SVM needs a training process and that
we have to extend the model to a multiclass problem, since it uses
a direct decision function [28]. We want to predict five different
road surfaces and have therefore a multiclass classification prob-
lem. We use a one-against-one method to classify multiple out-
puts, which was introduced in [29] and firstly applied on SVMs
in [30,31].
Our method to predict the road surface based on tire cavity
sound pressure data is summarized in Fig. 5.
5.1. Evaluation of the features
In order to evaluate our features, which are described in Sec-
tion 4.2, and to select a number of the most important ones, we
have to find a function Q, which is monotonically increasing with
the feasibility of feature combinations to separate the classes [32].
The feature selection improves our model in terms of simplifica-
tion for an easier interpretation, shorter training times and avoids
redundancy and overfitting. Overfitting is a problem occurring
when the statistical model is too complex. It tends to describe ran-
dom error and noise instead of the underlying relationships. If too
many parameters are taken into account during the training phase,
then the classifier will learn all data by heart and will show a very
Sensor
Analog data
Data acquistion (Section 2)
Time series
Feature exctraction (Section 4.2)
n-dimensional feature vectors
Feature selection (Section 5.1)
ñ-dimensional feature vectors (˜n ≤ n)
Feature aggregation (Section 5.2)
n̊-dimensional feature vectors (˚n ≤ ñ)
Training
Classification (Section 5)
Testing
Road surface of class Kl , l = 1, ..., k
good training error. On the other hand, the predictive performance
and the generalization will degrade and the prediction error will
increase.
We apply a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) [33] to
find the objective function Q.
The goal of the method is to find a group I of t features, in which
the means of feature values of the same class are concentrated and
in which the means of feature values of different classes are dif-
fuse. In other words, the means of the feature values of different
classes are supposed to be apart as much as possible.
The MANOVA method evaluates the feature sets based on the
between classes variance matrix B e and the within classes variance
matrix Wf.
We use Wilk’s Lambda or likelihood ratio test to find the objec-
tive function Q, which is widely used in recent literature, e.g.
[34,35].
The number of features to be used is set by the user, and every
possible feature combination is tested. The best combination is
selected by choosing the quality criterion Q closest to one.
5.2. Feature aggregation
We apply feature aggregation to reduce the size of the feature
space in order to compute the classification rules in a lower-
dimensional space and to spare computation time. In opposition
to feature selection, no features are disregarded. There are several
methods to perform feature aggregation, e.g. [36,37]. We apply one
of the most known feature aggregation procedures, namely linear
discriminant analysis (LDA) [38].
6. Results
We trained and tested our classifier to predict five different
classes of road surfaces based on the tire cavity sound pressure sig-
nal. Our data sets consists of 158 feature vectors for each of the 10
measurement segments listed in Table 1. The number of feature
vectors used for training and testing is shown in Table 4. We train
our classifier with approximately 50% of the all feature vectors. We
set aside the remaining data, which we do not use for training.
We present the confusion matrix as the output of our classifier.
In a confusion matrix M ¼ ðmij Þ 2 Nnn ; mii presents the true posi-
tives for class i. The other elements in row j are called false nega-
tives, in column i false positives and in the diagonal true negatives.
An overview of performance measures for classification tasks is
given in [39]. To evaluate our multi-class classifier and give proof
for generalization, we calculate the precision and recall for class i,
and the accuracy as follows:
mii
Precisioni ¼ Pn
j¼1 mji
mii
Recalli ¼ Pn ð1Þ
j¼1 mij
Pn
mii
Accuracy ¼ Pn i¼1 Pn
i¼1 j¼1 mij
With MANOVA, described in Section 5.1 we select the 5 most
important features out of 12, which are:
Table 4
Distribution of data set for classifier training and testing.

Class Number of feature vectors Training set Test set

Output (N – %) (N – %) (N – %)
Each class 318–100 160–50 158–50
Fig. 5. Overview of our method to predict the type of road surface based on time
Overall 1590–100 800–50 790–50
series data from tire cavity sound pressure measurements.
46 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48

 Power above 5000 Hz in dB
 First torus resonance power with moving bandpass filter in dB
 PowerPower of second octave
between 100 and 5000 Hz
in %
 Total acoustical power in dB
 Total
Power above 5000 Hz
acoustical power
in %,
sorted by importance. Furthermore, we use LDA to aggregate the 5
selected features into a 3-dimensional feature space.
Table 5 shows the confusion matrix of the output of our classi-
fier for the test data set, generated with [40]. Table 6 shows the cal-
culated performance measures for both, training and testing sets,
derived from the confusion matrices.
The performance measures indicate, that 2PA and SMA have a
very good prediction rate. For class EAC, 68 of the retrieved
instances are correctly predicted. However, there are bidirectional
misclassifications of class TOP and MALN. Overall, the accuracy of
our classifier for training is 74% and for testing 70%. Furthermore,
the performance measures for the training and testing process
are almost identical and indicate a very good generalization of
our classifier.
Due to the bidirectional misclassifications, we merge TOP and
MALN to one class. The performance measures of the new data
set with the merged classes for the testing process are shown in
Table 7. Furthermore, we smooth the output of our classifier with
a moving average of window length 5, since the type of road sur-
face does not usually vary for a few meters. Our post-processing
improves the accuracy and prediction rate of our method, as indi-
cated by the performance measures in Table 7. The accuracy of our
classifiers without and with smoothing are 85 and 92%
respectively.
7. Discussion
As we expected from the analysis of the PSD in Section 4, the
power above 5000 Hz is the main feature according to MANOVA.
This confirms the results shown in Fig. 4. As the acoustical power
distribution of SMA is highly concentrated in the high-frequency
domain, this covering type is automatically recognized with an
accuracy approaching 100%.
The accuracy of our classifier has been improved of almost 15–
85% by merging the TOP and MALN classes into one new class
without smoothing. This hypothesis can be justified by the fact
that those road surfaces look very identical. This is confirmed by
the grain size distribution curve presented in Fig. 2.
However, it must kept in mind that the roughness of the road
surface is not only determined by the grains size distribution curve,
but also by the sand and binder quantity, the construction process.
By merging those two road surface types, it appears that EAC
has poor precision and recall. Combined with the misclassification
distribution from Table 5, it can be deduced that the feature values
of EAC are situated between the values of 2PA and TOP = MALN.
However, with our presented post processing we could eliminate
misclassifications mainly for EAC and improve the accuracy to 92%.
The method we presented in this study is novel as it uses a self-
developed acoustical measuring system combined with algorithms
to predict the road surface type. The main possibility of today’s

Table 5
Confusion matrix for the 5-class road surface type classification of test data set.

Output class
2PA SMA EAC TOP MALN
Target class 2PA 124 0 28 2 4 158
SMA 0 158 0 0 0 158
EAC 18 0 107 21 12 158
TOP 3 0 25 71 59 158
MALN 2 0 4 60 92 158
147 158 164 154 167 790

Table 6
Results of 5 class classification on training and test data set.

Pavement type Training Testing

Precision (%) Recall (%) Precision (%) Recall (%)
2PA 90.7 90.1 84.4 78.5
SMA 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
EAC 80.0 72.7 65.2 67.7
TOP 47.5 48.4 46.1 44.9
MALN 55.0 56.4 55.1 58.2
Average 74.6 73.5 70.16 69.9
Accuracy 73.5 69.9

Table 7
Results of 5 class classification on test data set and smoothed, TOP = MALN.

Pavement type Testing Testing smoothed

Precision (%) Recall (%) Precision (%) Recall (%)
2PA 85.6 79.1 98.6 88.6
SMA 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
EAC 66.5 66.5 85.3 77.2
TOP = MALN 87.2 90.5 97.1 96.5
Average 84.8 84.0 95.1 90.6
Accuracy 85.3 91.8
 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48
measurement devices is the detection of road states such as snowy,
wet or dry from common vehicle sensors or laser sensors [41,42].
Nothing was done to extract the pavement type from the tire torus
noise. Our system has been designed to work in the flowing traffic
while its costs have been drastically reduced which gives it many
advantages against other methods such as optical or laser mea-
surement devices.
Our method could be further developed with an algorithm giv-
ing an estimation of the road age using the same method. This
could be implemented by making a second classification after the
road surface type has been determined. The road surface could
thus be classified into new road surface, partially damaged road sur-
face and road surface to be renewed.
The method we developed is based on the stationary properties
of the sound inside the tire. It is however possible to study the
influence of transient excitations such as driving through a pothole
or over tramway rails for example and introduce new classes. This
could therefore enable an accurate and fast mapping of the road
surface quality and unevenness, and therefore facilitate the work
of road maintenance companies.
8. Conclusion
We have presented a machine learning method to estimate dif-
ferent types of road surfaces. Our method takes multiple features
based on the PSD of time series data of the tire cavity sound under
vehicle operation as input. Moreover, we present a MANOVA
method to evaluate our features and select the most important
ones to distinguish between different road surfaces as well as a
LDA method to reduce the dimension of out feature space. We
trained and tested our classifier for five different road surface
types, namely TOP, MALN, SMA, EAC, and 2PA. We used 50% of
our data to train the algorithms and with the remaining 50% of data
we proof the generalization of our method. Furthermore, we have
calculated performance measures to evaluate the prediction rate.
Our classifier shows a poor prediction rate for MALN and TOP.
The reason might be, that these road surfaces are almost identical
in terms of grain size distribution and excites the tire in a similar
way. Therefore, we merge the two classes and our new classifier
has an accuracy of 85.3%.
Since the road surface does usually not change with a high fre-
quency, we introduce a post-processing, where we smooth the out-
put of our classifier with a moving average with window length 5.
With this post-processing, we could improve the performance of
our method as the prediction rate increased by 6.6–91.8%.
Overall, the performance measures indicate that our method
can determine the road surface with a high prediction rate. The
information of the road surface can be fused with additional
parameters, such as weather data and can be uploaded into a cloud
and stored in a digital map. Advanced driver assistance systems
could have access to this map and use the information to adjust
boundaries for velocity or in general for driving dynamics depend-
ing on the road surface and its tire/road frictional properties. More-
over, civil engineering offices or road infrastructure operators
could also use the collected information to identify surfaces with
a high level of tire/road noise and consequently perform the main-
tenance works at an early stage. This could prevent high cost main-
tenance, but also accidents and improve the living quality of
residents close to noisy roads.
The measurement system is further developed to acquire data
with many vehicles comprehensively and automatically. Our pre-
sented method will be adopted to different types of vehicles, e.g.
different sized cavities and therefore different sounds and to pro-
cess the data from numerous vehicles to determine the pavement
type and construction year.
47
Acknowledgment
This work was performed within the framework of the project
Technical Aspects of Monitoring the Acoustic Quality of Infrastruc-
ture in Road Transport, research project 3714541000, commis-
sioned by the German Federal Environment Agency, and funded
by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation,
Building and Nuclear Safety of Germany, within the Environmental
Research Plan 2014. The authors would like to thank Oliver Krauss
for his great input to this work.
References
[1] Botteldooren D, Dekoninck L, Gillis D. The influence of traffic noise on
appreciation of the living quality of a neighborhood. Int J Environ Res Public
Health 2011;8(3):777–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph8030777.
[2] Klæboe R, Amundsen AH, Fyhri A, Solberg S. Road traffic noise – the relationship
between noise exposure and noise annoyance in Norway. Appl Acoust 2004;65
(9):893–912. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2004.04.001.
[3] Ouis D. Annoyance from road traffic noise: a review. J Environ Psychol 2001;21
(1):101–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jevp.2000.0187.
[4] Öhrström E, Skanberg A, Svensson H, Gidlöf-Gunnarsson A. Effects of road
traffic noise and the benefit of access to quietness. J Sound Vib 2006;295(1–
2):40–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsv.2005.11.034.
[5] Babisch W, Beule B, Schust M, Kersten N, Ising H. Traffic noise and risk of
myocardial infarction. Epidemiology 2005;16(1):33–40. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1097/01.ede.0000147104.84424.24.
[6] Bluhm GL, Berglind N, Nordling E, Rosenlund M. Road traffic noise and
hypertension. Occup Environ Med 2007;64(2):122–6. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1136/oem.2005.025866.
[7] Selander J, Nilsson ME, Bluhm G, Rosenlund M, Lindqvist M, Nise G, et al. Long-
term exposure to road traffic noise and myocardial infarction. Epidemiology
2009;20(2):272–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0b013e31819463bd.
[8] Taylor SM, Breston BE, Hall FL. The effect of road traffic noise on house prices. J
Sound Vib 1982;80(4):523–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-460X(82)
90496-5.
[9] Wilhelmsson M. The impact of traffic noise on the values of single-family
houses. J Environ Plann Manage 2000;43(6):799–815. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/09640560020001692.
[10] Theebe MAJ. Planes, trains, and automobiles: the impact of traffic noise on
house prices. J Real Estate Financ Econ 2004;28(2):209–34. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1023/B:REAL.0000011154.92682.4b.
[11] Sandberg U. Tyre/road noise: myths and realities Tech rep. Swedish National
Road and Transport Research Institute; 2001.
[12] Sandberg U. Road traffic noise – the influence of the road surface and its
characterization. Appl Acoust 1987;21(2):97–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
0003-682X(87)90004-1.
[13] Bueno M, Luong J, Viñuela U, Terán F, Paje SE. Pavement temperature influence
on close proximity tire/road noise. Appl Acoust 2011;72(11):829–35. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2011.05.005.
[14] Sandberg U. Road traffic noise – the influence of the road surface and its
characterization. Appl Acoust 1987;21(2):97–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
0003-682X(87)90004-1.
[15] Frank EC, Pickering DJ, Raglin C. In-vehicle tire sound quality prediction from
tire noise data. In: SAE 2007 noise and vibration conference and exhibition,
SAE technical paper series. Warrendale (PA, United States): SAE
International400 Commonwealth Drive; 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.4271/
2007-01-2253.
[16] Sandberg U. Low noise road surfaces-a state-of-the-art review. J Acoust Soc Jpn
(E) 1999;20(1):1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1250/ast.20.1.
[17] Bundesministerium für Verkehr. Bau und Stadtentwicklung. Nationale
verkehrslärmschutzpaket ii: Lärm vermeiden – vor lärm schützen. URL
<http://www.bmvi.de//cae/servlet/contentblob/27798/publicationFile/
58/nationales-verkehrslaerm-schutzpaket-ii.pdf>.
[18] Jütterschenke P. Straßenlärm – eine gravierende Umweltbelastung – Wege zu
seiner Eindämmung. Bautechnik 2004;81(7):586–9. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1002/bate.200490134.
[19] Bschorr O. Determination of road induced tire noise by measuring of the torus
sound. Tech rep 1632; 2001.
[20] Krauss O, Gauterin F. Analysis of tire road noise using a tire cavity sound
measurement system. In: EURONOISE Prague 2012 – conference proceedings,
Prague.
[21] Sakata T, Morimura H, Ide H. Effects of tire cavity resonance on vehicle road
noise. Tire Sci Technol 1990;18(2):68–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.2346/
1.2141695.
[22] Jessop AM, Bolton JS. Tire surface vibration and sound radiation resulting from
the tire cavity mode. Tire Sci Technol 2011;39(4):245–55. http://dx.doi.org/
10.2346/1.3670037.
[23] Masino J, Daubner B, Frey M, Gauterin F. Development of a tire cavity sound
measurement system for the application of field operational tests. In: 2016
Annual IEEE systems conference (SysCon). p. 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/
SYSCON.2016.7490624.
48 J. Masino et al. / Applied Acoustics 125 (2017) 41–48
[24] Shannon CE. Communication in the presence of noise. Proc IRE 1949;37
(1):10–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1949.232969.
[25] Kay SM, Marple SL. Spectrum analysis; a modern perspective. Proc IEEE
1981;69(11):1380–419. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PROC.1981.12184.
[26] Marple L. Resolution of conventional fourier, autoregressive, and special ARMA
methods of spectrum analysis. In: IEEE International conference on acoustics,
speech, and signal processing. p. 74–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/
ICASSP.1977.1170219.
[27] Cortes C, Vapnik V. Support-vector networks. Mach Learn 1995;20(3):273–97.
[28] Abe S. Support vector machines for pattern classification, vol. 53. Springer;
2005.
[29] Knerr S, Personnaz L, Dreyfus G. Single-layer learning revisited: a stepwise
procedure for building and training a neural network. Berlin
(Heidelberg): Springer; 1990. p. 41–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-
76153-9_5.
[30] Friedman J. Another approach to polychotomous classification Tech rep.
Technical report. Department of Statistics, Stanford University; 1996.
[31] Kreßel UH-G. Pairwise classification and support vector machines. In:
Advances in kernel methods. MIT Press; 1999. p. 255–68.
[32] Reischl M, Gröll L, Mikut R. Evaluation of data mining approaches for the
control of multifunctional arm prostheses. Integr Comput-Aided Eng 2011;18
(3):235–49.
[33] Tatsuoka MM, Lohnes PR. Multivariate analysis: techniques for educational
and psychological research. Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc; 1988.
[34] Donaldson MR, Hinch SG, Jeffries KM, Patterson DA, Cooke SJ, Farrell AP, Miller
KM. Species-and sex-specific responses and recovery of wild, mature pacific
salmon to an exhaustive exercise and air exposure stressor. Comp Biochem
Physiol Part A: Mol Integr Physiol 2014;173:7–16.
[35] Patel S, Bhavsar C. Analysis of pharmacokinetic data by wilk’s lambda (an
important tool of manova). Int J Pharmaceut Sci Invent 2013;2(1):36–44.
[36] Schölkopf B, Smola A, Müller K-R. Nonlinear component analysis as a kernel
eigenvalue problem. Neural Comput 1998;10(5):1299–319.
[37] Carreira-Perpinán MA. A review of dimension reduction techniques,
Department of Computer Science. University of Sheffield. Tech rep. CS-96-09
9; 1997. p. 1–69.
[38] Reischl M. Ein Verfahren zum automatischen Entwurf von Mensch-Maschine-
Schnittstellen am Beispiel myoelektrischer Handprothesen. Karlsruhe: KIT
Scientific Publishing; 2006.
[39] Sokolova M, Lapalme G. A systematic analysis of performance measures for
classification tasks. Inform Process Manage 2009;45(4):427–37. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1016/j.ipm.2009.03.002.
[40] Mikut R, Burmeister O, Braun S, Reischl M. The open source matlab toolbox
gait-cad and its application to bioelectric signal processing. In: Proc, DGBMT-
Workshop Biosignalverarbeitung, Potsdam. p. 109–11.
[41] Deng W, Zhao Q. Road surface condition identification based on statistical
pattern recognition method. In: 2009 12th International IEEE conference on
intelligent transportation systems. p. 1–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/
ITSC.2009.5309862.
[42] Aki M, Rojanaarpa T, Nakano K, Suda Y, Takasuka N, Isogai T, et al. Road
surface recognition using laser radar for automatic platooning. IEEE
Trans Intell Transport Syst 2016;PP(99):1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/
TITS.2016.2528892.