Accident Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Accidents have been a major cause of deaths in India. More than 80% of accident-related deaths occur not due to the accident itself but the lack of timely help reaching the accident victims. In highways where the traffic is really light and fast-paced an accident victim could be left unattended for a long time. The intent is to create a system which would detect an accident based on the live feed of video from a CCTV camera installed on a highway. The idea is to take each frame of a video and run it through a deep learning convolution neural network model which has been trained to classify frames of a video into accident or non-accident. Convolutional Neural Networks has proven to be a fast and accurate approach to classify images. CNN based image classifiers have given accuracy's of more than 95% for comparatively smaller datasets and require less preprocessing as compared to other image classifying algorithms.

I. Introduction

Over 1.3 million deaths happen each year from road accidents, with a further of about 25 to 65 million people suffering from mild injuries as a result of road accidents. In a survey conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO)on road accidents based on the income status of the country, it is seen that low and middle-income or developing countries have the highest number of road accident related deaths. Developing countries have road accident death rate of about 23.5 per 100,000 population, which is much higher when compared to the 11.3 per 100,000 population for high-income or developed countries [1]. Over 90% of road traffic related deaths happen in developing countries, even though these countries have only half of the world's vehicles. In India, a reported 13 people are killed every hour as victims to road accidents across the country. However, the real case scenario could be much worse as many accident cases are left unreported. With the present data, India is on the way to the number one country in deaths from road accidents due to the poor average record of 13 deaths every hour, which is about 140,000 per year [2]. An accident usually has three phases in which a victim can be found.