Virtual road concept as a tool for road quality research

Road quality assessment using crowdsourced data gathered by smartphone users, based on acceleration data, is an interesting subject on using modern technology for improvements of the infrastructure. The algorithms - for both road quality assessment and detection of different elements on the road - need to be tested, especially in the field. To facilitate building sets of different data and sharing them in a standardised way, the authors propose extraction of known road fragments with known types of surface degradation and construction of virtual streams of data, thus "virtual roads". The procedure for data extraction and building a database of segments, combining them into virtual road, as well as testing real-world algorithm using the constructed virtual road are presented in the paper.