Detecting and locating of traffic incidents in a road segment based on lane-changing characteristics

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn road traffic, stalled vehicles, spilled loads and traffic accidents often result in traffic jams or secondary accidents. It is better for us to detect and locate these non-recurrent traffic incidents accurately as soon as possible, so that early warning, timely incident handling and speedy congestion evacuation will be better achieved. This paper proposes an automatic detecting and locating method of traffic incidents in a road segment based on lane-changing characteristics. At regular time intervals, for each traffic lane, the method calculates the lane-changing-out ratio of vehicles and judges whether a traffic incident has happened. For a traffic-incident lane, entry points and exit points of lane-changing vehicles are considered as positive and negative samples, respectively, then the traffic incident is confirmed further and its position is calculated by searching for the optimal separating surface of the two kinds of samples. Experimental results prove that the method is practicable and effective.