A survey of vision-based automatic incident detection technology

Automatic incident detection (AID) has become a necessity for the ever increasing traffic density for most major intersections and highways. Using vision-based AID systems, real-time incident information can be obtained automatically and precisely, and communicated to the Traffic Management Centre (TMC) for other posterior activities such as oncoming driver warning, incident processing and removal. Vision-based AID algorithms generally include three consecutive steps: object detection, vehicle tracking and activity understanding. In this paper, a great variety of vision-based AID methods are introduced and compared in detail. A method is suggested for evaluating performances of AID algorithms. In addition, this paper proposes several key technical difficulties and possible resolutions, which are often met in traffic incident detection process.