Advanced driving assistance integration in electric motorcycles: road surface classification with a focus on gravel detection using deep learning
Ranan Venancio, Vítor Manuel de Jesus Filipe, Adelaide Cerveira, Lio Gonçalves · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Riding a motorcycle involves risks that can be minimized through advanced sensing and response systems to assist the rider. The use of camera-collected images to monitor road conditions can aid in the development of tools designed to enhance rider safety and prevent accidents. This paper proposes a method for developing deep learning models designed to operate efficiently on embedded systems like the Raspberry Pi, facilitating real-time decisions that consider the road condition. Our research tests and compares several state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures, including EfficientNet and Inception, to determine which offers the best balance between inference time and accuracy. Specifically, we measured top-1 accuracy and inference time on a Raspberry Pi, identifying EfficientNetV2 as the most suitable model due to its optimal trade-off between performance and computational demand. The model's top-1 accuracy significantly outperformed other models while maintaining competitive inference speeds, making it ideal for real-time applications in traffic-dense urban settings.