VIDEO DETECTION FOR INCIDENT PREVENTION - DETECTION - VERIFICATION: SPARING LIVES AND SAVING MONEY

All over the world, most major roads suffer from the increasing traffic density. This increase in traffic results in more accidents, more vehicles involved, a larger risk for secondary accidents and long traffic jams. Today, increasing traffic volume and complexity has created a need for more optimized & improved Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology, highly automatic incident management systems in particular. Facts & figures such as 'more than 200,000 people killed each year' and also the need for more security result in more investments into safer roads and better control of the traffic on highways in general. Today, traffic managers are looking for effective incident management because this can save countless commuter hours, gallons of fuel, and thousands of dollars. Effective incident management completely depends on fast incident detection and fast incident verification. While video detection handles both traffic data collection and automatic incident detection, its incident detection shows a high detection rate, a short time to detect, a fast incident verification and a low false alarm rate. These characteristics make video extremely useful for reaching incident management goals such as fast & effective intervention or secondary incident prevention. The European research project RHYTHM aims to evaluate the benefits of using video for better traffic flow models and predictions of traffic jams and queue tails. This will further reduce the number of secondary casualties and also reduce the economic costs due to incident generated traffic jams. This paper contains a review of the basic characteristics of effective incident management and the role played by video detection as a solid solution. Wide area video incident detection proves to be the best and most reliable detection system currently available.