An investigation of a NIR camera system for road surface classification has been conducted for several road conditions. The surfaces were illuminated with three wavelengths, 980 nm, 1310 nm and 1550 nm and a halogen lamp, to simulate a real environment application with surrounding light. A measuring scheme to deal with surrounding light has been implemented enabling road condition classification from NIR images in a real environment. The retrieved camera images have been analyzed and an RGB representation of the different surfaces has been created to classify the different road conditions. The investigation shows that it is possible to distinguish between dry, moist, wet, frosty, icy and snowy road surfaces using a NIR camera system in a disturbed environment. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.