We also collect official crash reports from the Tennessee DepartmentofTransportation TrafficManagement Centerandmanuallylabelall other potential anomalies inthe dataset.

Rapid and reliable incident detection is critical for reducing crash-related fatalities, injuries, and congestion. However, conventional methods, such as closed-circuit television, dashcam footage, and sensor-based detection, separate detection from verification, suffer from limited flexibility, and require dense infrastructure or high penetration rates, restricting adaptability and scalability to shifting incident hotspots. To overcome these challenges, we developed DARTS, a drone-based, AI-powered real-time traffic incident detection system. DARTS integrates drones' high mobility and aerial perspective for adaptive surveillance, thermal imaging for better low-visibility performance and privacy protection, and a lightweight deep learning framework for real-time vehicle trajectory extraction and incident detection. The system achieved 99% detection accuracy on a self-collected dataset and supports simultaneous online visual verification, severity assessment, and incident-induced congestion propagation monitoring via a web-based interface. In a field test on Interstate 75 in Florida, DARTS detected and verified a rear-end collision 12 minutes earlier than the local transportation management center and monitored incident-induced congestion propagation, suggesting potential to support faster emergency response and enable proactive traffic control to reduce congestion and secondary crash risk. Crucially, DARTS's flexible deployment architecture reduces dependence on frequent physical patrols, indicating potential scalability and cost-effectiveness for use in remote areas and resource-constrained settings. This study presents a promising step toward a more flexible and integrated real-time traffic incident detection system, with significant implications for the operational efficiency and responsiveness of modern transportation management.

In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale lane-level freeway traffic dataset for anomaly detection.

Conventional automatic incident detection (AID) has relied heavily on all incident reports exclusively for training and evaluation. However, these reports suffer from a number of issues, such as delayed reports, inaccurate descriptions, false alarms, missing reports, and incidents that do not necessarily influence traffic. Relying on these reports to train or calibrate AID models hinders their ability to detect traffic anomalies effectively and timely, even leading to convergence issues in the model training process. Moreover, conventional AID models are not inherently designed to capture the early indicators of any generic incidents. It remains unclear how far ahead an AID model can report incidents. The AID applications in the literature are also spatially limited because the data used by most models is often limited to specific test road segments. To solve these problems, we propose a deep learning framework utilizing prior domain knowledge and model-designing strategies. This allows the model to detect a broader range of anomalies, not only incidents that significantly influence traffic flow but also early characteristics of incidents along with historically unreported anomalies. We specially design the model to target the early-stage detection/prediction of an incident. Additionally, unlike most conventional AID studies, we use widely available data, enhancing our method's scalability. The experimental results across numerous road segments on different maps demonstrate that our model leads to more effective and early anomaly detection. Our framework does not focus on stacking or tweaking various deep learning models; instead, it focuses on model design and training strategies to improve early detection performance.

For traffic incident detection, the acquisition of data and labels is notably resource-intensive, rendering semi-supervised traffic incident detection both a formidable and consequential challenge. Thus, this paper focuses on traffic incident detection with a semi-supervised learning way. It proposes a semi-supervised learning model named FPMT within the framework of MixText. The data augmentation module introduces Generative Adversarial Networks to balance and expand the dataset. During the mix-up process in the hidden space, it employs a probabilistic pseudo-mixing mechanism to enhance regularization and elevate model precision. In terms of training strategy, it initiates with unsupervised training on all data, followed by supervised fine-tuning on a subset of labeled data, and ultimately completing the goal of semi-supervised training. Through empirical validation on four authentic datasets, our FPMT model exhibits outstanding performance across various metrics. Particularly noteworthy is its robust performance even in scenarios with low label rates.

A significant number of traffic crashes are secondary crashes that occur because of an earlier incident on the road. Thus, early detection of traffic incidents is crucial for road users from safety perspectives with a potential to reduce the risk of secondary crashes. The wide availability of GPS devices now-a-days gives an opportunity of tracking and recording vehicle trajectories. The objective of this study is to use vehicle trajectory data for advance real-time detection of traffic incidents on highways using machine learning-based algorithms. The study uses three days of unevenly sequenced vehicle trajectory data and traffic incident data on I-10, one of the most crash-prone highways in Louisiana. Vehicle trajectories are converted to trajectories based on virtual detector locations to maintain spatial uniformity as well as to generate historical traffic data for machine learning algorithms. Trips matched with traffic incidents on the way are separated and along with other trips with similar spatial attributes are used to build a database for modeling. Multiple machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boost, and Artificial Neural Network models are used to detect a trajectory that is likely to face an incident in the downstream road section. Results suggest that the Random Forest model achieves the best performance for predicting an incident with reasonable recall value and discrimination capability.

Prior art in traffic incident detection relies on high sensor coverage and is primarily based on decision-tree and random forest models that have limited representation capacity and, as a result, cannot detect incidents with high accuracy. This paper presents IncidentNet - a novel approach for classifying, localizing, and estimating the severity of traffic incidents using deep learning models trained on data captured from sparsely placed sensors in urban environments. Our model works on microscopic traffic data that can be collected using cameras installed at traffic intersections. Due to the unavailability of datasets that provide microscopic traffic details and traffic incident details simultaneously, we also present a methodology to generate a synthetic microscopic traffic dataset that matches given macroscopic traffic data. IncidentNet achieves a traffic incident detection rate of 98%, with false alarm rates of less than 7% in 197 seconds on average in urban environments with cameras on less than 20% of the traffic intersections.

Early and accurate detection of anomalous events on the freeway, such as accidents, can improve emergency response and clearance. However, existing delays and errors in event identification and reporting make it a difficult problem to solve. Current large-scale freeway traffic datasets are not designed for anomaly detection and ignore these challenges. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale lane-level freeway traffic dataset for anomaly detection. Our dataset consists of a month of weekday radar detection sensor data collected in 4 lanes along an 18-mile stretch of Interstate 24 heading toward Nashville, TN, comprising over 3.7 million sensor measurements. We also collect official crash reports from the Nashville Traffic Management Center and manually label all other potential anomalies in the dataset. To show the potential for our dataset to be used in future machine learning and traffic research, we benchmark numerous deep learning anomaly detection models on our dataset. We find that unsupervised graph neural network autoencoders are a promising solution for this problem and that ignoring spatial relationships leads to decreased performance. We demonstrate that our methods can reduce reporting delays by over 10 minutes on average while detecting 75% of crashes. Our dataset and all preprocessing code needed to get started are publicly released at https://vu.edu/ft-aed/ to facilitate future research.

Traffic incident detection plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems, which has gained great attention in transport engineering. In the past, traditional machine learning (ML) based detection methods achieved good performance under a centralised computing paradigm, where all data are transmitted to a central server for building ML models therein. Nowadays, deep neural networks based federated learning (FL) has become a mainstream detection approach to enable the model training in a decentralised manner while warranting local data governance. Such neural networks-centred techniques, however, have overshadowed the utility of well-established ML-based detection methods. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of potent conventional ML-based detection models in modern traffic scenarios featured by distributed data. We leverage an elegant but less explored distributed optimisation framework named Network Lasso, with guaranteed global convergence for convex problem formulations, integrate the potent convex ML model with it, and compare it with centralised learning, local learning, and federated learning methods atop a well-known traffic incident detection dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed network lasso-based approach provides a promising alternative to the FL-based approach in data-decentralised traffic scenarios, with a strong convergence guarantee while rekindling the significance of conventional ML-based detection methods.

In cities worldwide, cars cause health and traffic problems whichcould be partly mitigated through an increased modal share of bicycles. Many people, however, avoid cycling due to a lack of perceived safety. For city planners, addressing this is hard as they lack insights intowhere cyclists feel safe and where they do not. To gain such insights,we have in previous work proposed the crowdsourcing platform SimRa,which allows cyclists to record their rides and report near miss incidentsvia a smartphone app. In this paper, we present CycleSense, a combination of signal pro-cessing and Machine Learning techniques, which partially automatesthe detection of near miss incidents, thus making the reporting of nearmiss incidents easier. Using the SimRa data set, we evaluate CycleSenseby comparing it to a baseline method used by SimRa and show that itsignificantly improves incident detection.