Traffic accident detection with spatiotemporal impact measurement

Abstract

Traffic incidents continue to cause a significant loss in deaths, injuries, and property damages. Reported traffic accident data contains a considerable amount of human errors, hindering the studies on traffic accidents. Several approaches have been developed to detect accidents using traffic data in real time. However, those approaches do not consider the spatiotemporal patterns inherent in traffic data, resulting in high false alarm rates. In this paper, we study the problem of traffic accident detection by considering multiple traffic speed time series collected from road network sensors. To capture the spatiotemporal impact of traffic accidents to upstream locations, we adopt Impact Interval Grouping (IIG), which compares real-time traffic speed with historical data, and generates impact intervals to determine the presence of accidents. Furthermore, we take a multivariate time series classification approach and extract three novel features to measure the severity of traffic accidents. We use real-world traffic speed and accident datasets in our empirical evaluation, and our solutions outperform state-of-the-art approaches in multivariate time series classification.