Near Real-Time Freeway Accident Detection

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of detecting accidents using speed sensors distributed spatially on a freeway is considered. Due to the significant impact of road accidents on health and development, early and accurate detection of accidents is crucial. To address this issue, a novel Bayesian quickest change detection formulation is introduced, which considers both average detection delay and false alarm rate. The optimum strategy is derived via dynamic programming and shown to compare a recursively computed statistic with a function of false alarm to identify accidents as they happen. Considering that post-accident conditions are typically not known, two methods are proposed that recursively estimate multiple unknown parameters during the accident detection process. Further, four aggregation methods are proposed to improve performance exploiting spatial correlations between sensors. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate improvement up to 65.2% and 87.2% in average detection delay and false alarm rate, respectively, against prior work.