A New Video-Based Crash Detection Method: Balancing Speed and Accuracy Using a Feature Fusion Deep Learning Framework

Quick and accurate crash detection is important for saving lives and improved traffic incident management. In this paper, a feature fusion-based deep learning framework was developed for video-based urban traffic crash detection task, aiming at achieving a balance between detection speed and accuracy with limited computing resource. In this framework, a residual neural network (ResNet) combined with attention modules was proposed to extract crash-related appearance features from urban traffic videos (i.e., a crash appearance feature extractor), which were further fed to a spatiotemporal feature fusion model, Conv-LSTM (Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory), to simultaneously capture appearance (static) and motion (dynamic) crash features. The proposed model was trained by a set of video clips covering 330 crash and 342 noncrash events. In general, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 87.78% on the testing dataset and an acceptable detection speed (FPS > 30 with GTX 1060). Thanks to the attention module, the proposed model can capture the localized appearance features (e.g., vehicle damage and pedestrian fallen-off) of crashes better than conventional convolutional neural networks. The Conv-LSTM module outperformed conventional LSTM in terms of capturing motion features of crashes, such as the roadway congestion and pedestrians gathering after crashes. Compared to traditional motion-based crash detection model, the proposed model achieved higher detection accuracy. Moreover, it could detect crashes much faster than other feature fusion-based models (e.g., C3D). The results show that the proposed model is a promising video-based urban traffic crash detection algorithm that could be used in practice in the future.