28. November 2022
4 Minutes

AI app detects road damage – final thesis at Arineo

For Sebastian Kampen, a business informatics student from Göttingen, Arineo is the ultimate in corporate culture. But the still young IT service company also convinces him professionally. So it's no wonder that he goes from being an intern to a working student.

Students of Computer Science, Business Informatics, or Business Administration can work at Arineo as student trainees or interns on various customer or innovation projects. Göttingen student Sebastian Kampen took advantage of this opportunity to gain valuable practical experience in the field of artificial intelligence. 

Professionally supervised by Dr Gerhard Heinzerling’s AI team, Sebastian Kampen was also able to write his bachelor’s thesis at Arineo: “As an IT service provider, Arineo offers a broad portfolio in the field of artificial intelligence, such as image, sound and video processing. The AI team is currently working on a project that uses images to detect road damage in cities. It was through my involvement in the project that the idea for my final thesis came about,” explains Sebastian Kampen. The scientific supervision was taken over by the Chair of Information Management of Prof. Kolbe, who has already conducted scientifically investigations on the topic of “Image recognition for road conditions” within the Smart Mobility Research Group.

Arineo’s AI project includes an artificial intelligence app that takes and processes photos of road damage. It then classifies and subsequently reports the road damage. The city council can then quickly award the appropriate repair contract to a suitable road construction company. This saves time and personnel costs, as the damage would otherwise have to be recorded and processed manually via city inspections.[1] 

Sebastian Kampen’s thesis for his degree in business informatics specifically involves the development of a mobile app for the classification of road damage, in connection with road maintenance. “Sebastian worked with us to answer his research questions using the concept of neural networks to classify images, something that we also use with our B2B clients. The road damage app is a great example of the diverse use of AI to optimise business processes. Image recognition can be used in nearly any industry and field of activity,” reports Dr Gerhard Heinzerling, Senior Data Scientist at Arineo.  

Arineo congratulates Sebastian Kampen on the excellent results of his bachelor’s thesis (grade 1.3) and is pleased that he will continue to contribute to artificial intelligence.  

[i] For example: Chatterjee, S., Saeedfar, P., Tofangchi, S. and Kolbe, L. M. (2018). Intelligent Road Maintenance: A Machine Learning Approach for Surface Defect Detection. In: European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Portsmouth, UK, pp 1-16.

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