I have about 32 seconds worth of accelerometer data of a basic driving scenario 25MPH normal roads along with hitting about 7 potholes and a rough patch of road. The accelerometer is mounted on the dash board of my car with double sided tape.

Problem: I have all the data that is noisy from the accelerometer, and I need to make a simple way to detect that a pothole event has occurred. Below are several graphs of data in time domain and FFT. The accelerometer is measuring in GForce

Basically I want my arduino to know a pothole has occurred with fairly great accuracy and not using graduate level mathematics and techniques.

Accelerometer sampled at 100hz has a simple 50HZ RC LOW PASS FILTER ON THE Z AXIS

Here is the CSV data for the 32 seconds of accelerometer readings TIME, GFORCE format:


UPDATE: This is the RAW full bandwidth of accelerometer 1000HZ sampled at highest sampling rate I could get on Arduino. Direct CSV file download: About 112 Seconds of data


Black trace is RAW unfiltered Accelerometer data: Blue trace is filtered by a bandstop filter based on the extreme frequencies found in FFT, Dominate 2HZ and 12HZ.


Pothole event looks like this in time domain: enter image description here

not sure what the 10 to 15HZ component is in the FFT, is that the actual pothole, or is it the wheel hop of the wheels against the road, or is it the resonant frequency of the car?



seems like it is the actual pothole events, here is a HPF @ 13HZ The dominant features of the potholes seem enhanced


I want to be able to detect and count the potholes in real time

It seems to be counter-intuitive the suspension should move a lot slower than a 10 to 13 HZ that would cause motion-sickness I believe


As per AngryEE's suggestions, I used the full bandwidth of the accelerometer 1000HZ and the maximum sampling rate I could get on the arduino.



here is a sample piece of data of the pothole event and some bumps and road noise around it:


Added the Diode envelope detector circuit, output looks the same... The accelerometer always output 0 to 3.3Volts not negative... enter image description here


From many road tests, I never exceeded 1.6G's up to 45 MPH in my car on the Z axis, I used rand() to generate pseudorandom Gforce acceleration.

My idea is if I can look at 1 to 3 second windows of data, I can calculate displacement of the Z axis, but I was worried about the accelerometer drift, and errors in the integration. I don't need to be even 90% accurate here, >70% would be nice, but if I'm looking at displacement at one to three seconds at a time would that be possible to do in real time? This way I can see if the displacement is greater than like 1 inch, 2 inches, 5 inches. The bigger the displacement the rougher the bump or pothole was:

Can you check if I'm doing this right, I basically set up on my desktop, using rand() to generate random acceleration from -1.6 to 1.6 G's, capturing 3 seconds of data @ a simulated 50HZ sampling rate

If like you run *nix, I'm using Sleep() from Windows.h to make the 20mS delay, 50HZ sampling rate

I just wanted to see if the code looks right to you, I didn't do the cicular buffer yet, I'm kinda confused on how to implement it: the commented out code, is from the class I'm working on for it, but I don't understand it 100% yet. A circular buffer would allow to contiguously move windows of data right?

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <ctime> // USED BY RAND
#include <windows.h> // Used for delay

using namespace std;

#define SAMPLE_RATE   0.020 // Sample rate in Milliseconds
#define GRAVITYFT_SEC 32 // Gravity velocity 32 feet/sec
#define INCH_FOOT     12 // 12 inches in foot, from velocity to inch displacement calculation

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    srand((unsigned)time(0)); // SEED RAND() for simulation of Geforce Readings


   // circular_buffer Acceleration; // Create a new Circular buffer for Acceleration

   // cb_init(&Acceleration, 150, 4); // Sampling @ 50HZ, 3 seconds of data = 150, size is float data of 4 bytes

    //Simulate a sample run of Acceleration data using Rand()

    // WE WILL BE SIMULATING "RANDOM" GEFORCE RATINGS using the rand() function constraining to -1.6 to 1.6 GFORCE 
    // These ratings are consistent with our road tests of apparently random vibration and Geforce readings not exceeding about 1.6 G's

    float Gforce[150]; // Random Geforce for 3 second window of data
    float velocity[150]; // Hold velocity information
    float displacement[150]; // Hold Displacement information

    float LO = -1.6; // Low GForce limit recorded from 6 road tests at different speeds
    float HI = 1.6; // High GForce limit recorded from 6 road tests at different speeds

    for(int i = 0; i < 150; i++) // 3 Second iwndow of random acceleration data
            Gforce[i] = LO + (float)rand()/((float)RAND_MAX/(HI-LO)); // Borrowed from Stackexchange : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/686353/c-random-float
            if( i == 0) // Initial values @ first Acceleration
                velocity[i] = Gforce[i] * SAMPLE_RATE * GRAVITYFT_SEC; // Initial velocity
                displacement[i] = velocity[i] * SAMPLE_RATE * INCH_FOOT; // Initial Displacement
                velocity[i] = velocity[i-1] + (Gforce[i] * SAMPLE_RATE * GRAVITYFT_SEC); // Calculate running velocity into buffer
                displacement[i] = displacement[i-1] +(velocity[i] * SAMPLE_RATE * INCH_FOOT); // Calculate running displacement into buffer
            //cout << endl << Gforce[i]; // Debugging
            //cb_push_back(&Acceleration, &Gforce[i]);                   // Push the GeForce into the circular buffer

            Sleep(SAMPLE_RATE*1000); // 20mS delay simulates 50HZ sampling rate Sleep() expects number in mS already so * 1000

    for (int j = 0; j < 150; j++)
                cout << setprecision (3) << Gforce[j] << "\t\t" << velocity[j] << "\t\t" << displacement[j] << endl;


    //cb_free(&Acceleration); // Pervent Memory leaks

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;

Sample run:

    GFORCE          FT/SEC          Inch Displacement Z axis

-0.882          -0.565          -0.136
0.199           -0.437          -0.24
-1.32           -1.29           -0.549
0.928           -0.691          -0.715
0.6             -0.307          -0.788
1.47            0.635           -0.636
0.849           1.18            -0.353
-0.247          1.02            -0.108
1.29            1.85            0.335
0.298           2.04            0.824
-1.04           1.37            1.15
1.1             2.08            1.65
1.52            3.05            2.38
0.078           3.1             3.12
-0.0125         3.09            3.87
1.24            3.88            4.8
0.845           4.42            5.86
0.25            4.58            6.96
0.0463          4.61            8.06
1.37            5.49            9.38
-0.15           5.39            10.7
0.947           6               12.1
1.18            6.75            13.7
-0.791          6.25            15.2
-1.43           5.33            16.5
-1.58           4.32            17.5
1.52            5.29            18.8
-0.208          5.16            20.1
1.36            6.03            21.5
-0.294          5.84            22.9
1.22            6.62            24.5
1.14            7.35            26.3
1.01            8               28.2
0.284           8.18            30.1
1.18            8.93            32.3
-1.43           8.02            34.2
-0.167          7.91            36.1
1.14            8.64            38.2
-1.4            7.74            40
-1.49           6.79            41.7
-0.926          6.2             43.2
-0.575          5.83            44.6
0.978           6.46            46.1
-0.909          5.87            47.5
1.46            6.81            49.2
0.353           7.04            50.8
-1.12           6.32            52.4
-1.12           5.6             53.7
-0.141          5.51            55
0.463           5.8             56.4
-1.1            5.1             57.6
0.591           5.48            59
0.0912          5.54            60.3
-0.47           5.23            61.5
-0.437          4.96            62.7
0.734           5.42            64
-0.343          5.21            65.3
0.836           5.74            66.7
-1.11           5.03            67.9
-0.771          4.54            69
-0.783          4.04            69.9
-0.501          3.72            70.8
-0.569          3.35            71.6
0.765           3.84            72.5
0.568           4.21            73.5
-1.45           3.28            74.3
0.391           3.53            75.2
0.339           3.75            76.1
0.797           4.26            77.1
1.3             5.09            78.3
0.237           5.24            79.6
1.52            6.21            81.1
0.314           6.41            82.6
0.369           6.65            84.2
-0.598          6.26            85.7
-0.905          5.68            87.1
-0.732          5.22            88.3
-1.47           4.27            89.4
0.828           4.8             90.5
0.261           4.97            91.7
0.0473          5               92.9
1.53            5.98            94.3
1.24            6.77            96
-0.0228         6.76            97.6
-0.0453         6.73            99.2
-1.07           6.04            101
-0.345          5.82            102
0.652           6.24            104
1.37            7.12            105
1.15            7.85            107
0.0238          7.87            109
1.43            8.79            111
1.08            9.48            113
1.53            10.5            116
-0.709          10              118
-0.811          9.48            121
-1.06           8.8             123
-1.22           8.02            125
-1.4            7.13            126
0.129           7.21            128
0.199           7.34            130
-0.182          7.22            132
0.135           7.31            133
0.885           7.87            135
0.678           8.31            137
0.922           8.9             139
-1.54           7.91            141
-1.16           7.16            143
-0.632          6.76            145
1.3             7.59            146
-0.67           7.16            148
0.124           7.24            150
-1.19           6.48            151
-0.728          6.01            153
1.22            6.79            154
-1.33           5.94            156
-0.402          5.69            157
-0.532          5.35            159
1.27            6.16            160
0.323           6.37            162
0.428           6.64            163
0.414           6.91            165
-0.614          6.51            166
1.37            7.39            168
0.449           7.68            170
0.55            8.03            172
1.33            8.88            174
-1.2            8.11            176
-0.641          7.7             178
-1.59           6.69            179
1.02            7.34            181
-0.86           6.79            183
-1.55           5.79            184
-0.515          5.46            186
0.352           5.69            187
0.824           6.22            188
1.14            6.94            190
-1.03           6.29            192
-1.13           5.56            193
0.139           5.65            194
0.293           5.84            196
1.08            6.53            197
-1.23           5.75            199
-1.1            5.04            200
-1.17           4.29            201
-0.8            3.78            202
-0.905          3.2             203
-0.0769         3.15            203
-0.323          2.95            204
-0.0186         2.93            205
Press any key to continue . . .
  • 3
    \$\begingroup\$ Nicely detailed write-up. However: Editing this to state a specific, relatively narrow question, would help get focused answers. \$\endgroup\$ – Anindo Ghosh Jan 31 '13 at 3:57
  • \$\begingroup\$ Wrote a general specific question , I need a way to detect that a pothole has occurred from a raw noisy accelometer signal. Extracting useful features or detection method that would allow a microcontroller like the arduino to detect the pothole event had occurred in real time \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Jan 31 '13 at 4:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ Since your pothole event is slower than the vibrations that exist irrespective of the pothole, you should probably LPF it instead and enhance the nice bump you're getting near the pothole. A moving average filter may be able to do it. To make life easier, you could also consider using the abs value of the measurement instead before you LPF it, since your pothole even seems to be characterized by a single packet with enhanced envelope amplitude, modulated by the car's vibration frequency. \$\endgroup\$ – Chintalagiri Shashank Jan 31 '13 at 9:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ Updated information, thanks and I'll be working on moving average, the suspension resonance seems to be around 12.5HZ??? the LPF in hardware would have a cutoff around there I would assume \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 3 '13 at 22:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ Supply a good example CSV file or something. Where you say the data is available above doesn't seem to work as a link. \$\endgroup\$ – Olin Lathrop Feb 3 '13 at 22:35

This looks like it can be solved by fairly straight forward filtering. Here is your original data:

That's too much to see what goes on in a individual event at the level of detail appropriate for here. Here is just the data from second 26 to 28:

I had originally thought to low pass filter this, but that doesn't work because there isn't a low frequency signal in there. The amplitude of the high frequency signal goes up instead. Here is a low pass superimposed onto the original:

Notice this follows the "average" of the signal pretty well not during the pothole event. If we subtract this average from the original signal, we are left with much higher excursions from this average during the event than otherwise. Put another way, what we really want is a high pass filter. We'll do that by subtracting the low pass from the original since that's how we got here, but in a production system you'd do this by explicitly high pass filtering. Anyway, here is the high pass filtered original:

This now points out a obvious approach for detecting the event. There is a lot more signal amplitude during the event than otherwise. We can detect this by computing the RMS and applying some low pass filtering:

Zooming back at the whole data, we see:

This clearly identifies five events in the data, although I don't know if that's what this data is supposed to show. Looking at the events more closely, you notice that each of them has low dips about 1 second before and after the peaks. This means more can be done if simply thresholding the RMS signal as it is now is not good enough. For example, a simple algorithm that looked for the height of a point relative to the lowest within 1 second either way should further reduce the background noise. Another way to say about the same thing is to differentiate this signal looking for the rise over a 1 second period. A pothole event would then be detected by a doublet, meaning a high peak follwed by a low peak.

Another way of looking at this is to band pass the RMS signal. It is already low pass filtered, but since you are looking for sudden events with strong slopes, lopping off some of the low frequencies should work to reduce the background noise too.

There are lots of ways to refine the signal from here, but hopefully I've shown how to get to at least a first pass useful result.


I was curious how well looking for dips either side of a peak would work, so I tried it. I used a non-linear filter starting with the RMS from the previous plot. The value of each point is the minimum of how much it is above the lowest point in the previous second and the lowest point in the next second. The result looks quite good:

The lowest of the 5 peaks is over 3 times higher than the highest background noise. This is of course assuming these 5 bumps represent events you want to detect and the rest doesn't.

Added in response to comments:

I did the filters in the time domain, so I don't know the frequency response directly. For the low pass filter I convolved the input signal with a COS^2 filter kernel. If I remember right, the radius (distance from center to edge) of the kernel as a few 100 ms. I experimented with the value until the plot looked good. To low pass filter the RMS, I used the same filter kernel but this time with a radius of about a second. I don't remember exactly. Experiment until you get good results.

The non-linear filter did not detect doublets. As I said, I found the difference between the current point and the lowest of all the points within 1 second before, and also the difference between the current point and the lowest of all the points within 1 second after. Then I took the min of those two.

The software I used was a program I hacked up for this purpose. I already had various routines to read and write CSV files, so all I had to write was the filtering code, which is very simple. The rest was done with pre-existing programs I have for manipulating and plotting CSV files.

  • \$\begingroup\$ WOW this is very exciting results, you have a great way of explaining things in practical terms and I'm excited to get home and start working on this! I'm curious what cutoff frequency you used in the HPF, and the LPF cutoff for the RMS signal that looks perfect. Also, the non-linear filter you used to detect the doublets, did you do that in matlab or a design application? I want to try to design this in hardware also, the 5 peaks you are getting coincide with the 5 potholes I hit, Great result! I have matlab and also been using SciDavis \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 4 '13 at 19:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ @zach: I'll try to update my answer to address some of your questions. Unfortunately my answer got converted to community wiki, so I'm waiting for a mod to fix that first. This CW thing really sucks when you spend time on something, then suddenly you don't own it anymore. \$\endgroup\$ – Olin Lathrop Feb 4 '13 at 20:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ @OlinLathrop You will have it convert back when you edit it. You should flag me to revert it once you have finished editing. I will do it now, but dont be surprised if you have to flag again. On the note of complaining about CW, we have to revert a CW once every 4-6 months, I think you are talking about a very narrow case of situation where there are this many edits and the user does not want to be CW, and compared to dealing with Tony or some other situation, this is about the ideal flag to deal with, easy and clean cut. :) \$\endgroup\$ – Kortuk Feb 4 '13 at 20:50
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @Andrew: As I said in the last paragraph of my answer, I have various canned programs that manipulate CSV files and library routines that make it easy to read and write them. Adding filtering code above that is quick and easy. Most filters are just a few lines of code executed many times. For one off testing, like what I did above, there is no need to efficiently use the processor since everything finishes instantaneously anway. For example, I called the COS function whenever needed instead of building a table. \$\endgroup\$ – Olin Lathrop Feb 6 '13 at 13:59
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @OlinLathrop I saw what you'd mentioned in the answer but I didn't know if you had some custom scripts set up, maybe matlab or something to run it though or what you did. Could you share how you're doing it? It sounds fascinating. Are you using canned graphics libraries to view the output, just dumping and plotting in Excel or using gnuplot/octave or ...? \$\endgroup\$ – akohlsmith Feb 6 '13 at 18:10

Edge detecting potholes may be asking for trouble. The cars vibration envelope is where the answer lies, since the actual vibrations seen by the sensor are at much higher frequencies. I'd go with RMS to DC which responds at about 15Hz or higher and low pass the thing.

  • \$\begingroup\$ Just did another test with full sensor bandwidth of 1000HZ and sampled as fast as I could over serial with Arduino. Getting similar results. Any frequency over around 17HZ quickly dies off compared to the dominate frequency of 2HZ and 13HZ I still don't get where the 9 to 13.5HZ stuff is coming from. The accelerometer is mounted on the dashboard, The suspension isn't obviously moving at 9 to 13HZ or I would be bouncing around like crazy. I'm not sure what you mean about RMS to DC? \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Jan 31 '13 at 22:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ Your accelerometer is attached in some way to the car. Even if you've somehow bolted the thing to your undercarriage, the bolts can suppress and amplify frequencies. A car is a sufficiently complex beast for things to be vibrating at many different frequencies. There are circuits (and probably mathematical algorithms) which convert an AC signal into its DC RMS value. A search should find one. That could help you generate the envelope of your signal by turning the high frequency vibrations into their amplitude. \$\endgroup\$ – Chintalagiri Shashank Feb 1 '13 at 5:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ What about a half-wave rectifier (diode)? but that would convert everything to positive peaks, the pothole event pulls -G's or this wouldn't be a problem? \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 1 '13 at 18:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ I don't expect it would be a problem. Your vibration amplitudes seem to be high enough to be the dominant effect. However, looking at your signals, I'd suggest full wave rectification instead to avoid missing the smaller potholes. \$\endgroup\$ – Chintalagiri Shashank Feb 1 '13 at 18:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ Shashack Added the evelope circuit posted above, the output didn't change much at all. I picked the RC time constant to be around 2mS, I'm sampling at 2mS 500 Samples/ second The accelerometer voltage is always between 0 and 3.3V though... never goes negative so the diode wouldn't work? \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 3 '13 at 23:36

Instead of looking for a frequency domain filter or a threshold, I recommend trying to come up with a kernel for a "typical" pothole, and doing a running correlation with it. It would be considered a template-matching technique, and would seem to lend itself to a microcontroller platform.

See http://scribblethink.org/Work/nvisionInterface/vi95_lewis.pdf for a quick review, and maybe DOBBS, STEVEN E., NEIL M. SCHMITT, and HALUK S. OZEMEK. "QRS detection by template matching using real-time correlation on a microcomputer." Journal of clinical engineering 9.3 (1984): 197-212.

If you were on a beefier platform, I'd recommend giving wavelets a spin.

  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks :), This seems to very difficult to do, or am I missing something? \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 1 '13 at 18:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ More difficult than a simple filter, but more likelihood that it will do what you want it to do when you're done! By all means, don't try to implement it on a microcontroller until you've got it working in something like Matlab or R \$\endgroup\$ – Scott Seidman Feb 1 '13 at 20:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ To run your "filter" in real time, you would presumably handle it as a convolution as opposed to carrying out a frequency domain multiplication at every time step. A cross-correlation (a main approach to template matching) would be the same exact operation, except the time scale of the impulse response would not be inverted as it would be in a convolution, and we would call this impulse response a "template". Now, you just need to figure out what that template needs to be. \$\endgroup\$ – Scott Seidman Feb 4 '13 at 19:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for this answer, I'll have to do a lot more research and studying to implement it as it seems to be above my current skill-level. I appreciate the effort though \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 4 '13 at 21:19

Another approach would be calculating a moving variance of your signal to see if the potholes really stick out. Here's a matlab function for a moving variance filter, N points wide -- cleverly (if I must say so myself) using a convolution for calculation

function y=movingvar(X,N)
% y=movingvar(X,N)
% Calculates N-point moving variance of  Vector X
% Highly recommend that N be odd (no error checking)
% Note: first and last N/2 points will be unreliable.
% Output will be a column vector.


  • \$\begingroup\$ Would this be similar to a standard deviation calculation? \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 4 '13 at 21:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ yup, just squared \$\endgroup\$ – Scott Seidman Feb 4 '13 at 22:01

My initial thought is that a low-pass filter might be the wrong type of filter to use. The pothole is essentially a high-frequency event - like a step function or square wave. Just looking at the 50Hz filtered data makes me think that you're losing the information about the pothole - it all looks like the same squiggles with no significant distinction for the pothole event. I would first use a high-pass filter, then a low-pass filter with a much higher frequency. You might avoid the low-pass filter altogether if your accelerometer is already low-pass filtered.

Once you have the high-pass filtered data I think that a simple comparator with a threshold set suitably will pick out the peaks in the acceleration data caused by the potholes and allow you to count them.

  • \$\begingroup\$ I'll take off the RC 50HZ filter then the accelerometer will use a default 500HZ or 1000HZ LPF which should be high enough to get the mechanical vibration. I'll increase the sample rate from 100HZ to 1000HZ and post more data. Thanks for the insight \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Jan 31 '13 at 19:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ I used the full bandwidth of the accelerometer and faster sampling, seem to be getting similar data :( this is confusing on how to filter and isolate the pothole and bump events \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 1 '13 at 18:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ I said to use a HIGH pass filter, not a low one. I'd be interested to see an FFT of the unfiltered data. \$\endgroup\$ – AngryEE Feb 1 '13 at 18:49
  • \$\begingroup\$ Well the accelerometer has a built in 1000HZ LPF and I can't change that. I'll post it soon the FFT of the unfiltered data \$\endgroup\$ – zacharoni16 Feb 1 '13 at 18:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ You don't need to change that - you want the high frequencies that come from the abrupt acceleration when you hit a pothole but not the gentle swaying of normal ride. Your signal seems to be characterized by a low-frequency vibration with several major transient spikes. You want the high-frequencies to capture the quick transient spikes but you want to reject the constant low frequencies. Thus, you should probably filter out everythingunder 50Hz or 100Hz. \$\endgroup\$ – AngryEE Feb 1 '13 at 19:20

protected by W5VO Feb 1 '13 at 1:25


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