Research Progress of Traffic Incident Automatic Detection Algorithms

Traffic incident automatic detection is one of important issues for ITS research, especially, for advanced traffic management system and advanced traveler information system research. Automatic incident detection (AID) systems use algorithms to analyze traffic data and detect incidents quickly so as to reduce their adverse effects. Since 1960s a variety of freeway incident algorithms have been developed based on traffic flow theory, pattern recognition, statistical techniques and recently using artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. In this paper, review of these existing incident detection algorithms, and the method of improving the performance of incident detection algorithm are presented.