Identifying Potholes
On The Road Using AI

On our way to Hack The North 2019, my friends and I noticed that there were a lot of potholes and irregularities on the road. On our drive to the hackathon we started thinking of ways this could be improved and came up with an idea that leveraged AI, hardware, a cloud database and a publicly available website. Our idea was to build a pothole detector that could passively run from the dashboard of cars or government owned vehicles such as buses in the public transit system. We trained a detector to identify potholes and then deployed it on a Raspberry Pi with a GPS module plus a camera. Every time a pothole was identified, an image and a location marker was dropped on a publicly available map. I was amazed at the potential of AI to solve such massive problems. A simple neural network could become another pair of eyes on the road and watch over our public infrastructure to ensure it's usable for all.