90
Paper No. 01-2453
Automated Accident Detection System
Charles Harlow and Yu Wang
The development of a system for automatically detecting and reporting
traffic accidents at intersections was considered. A system with these
properties would be beneficial in determining the cause of accidents and
could also be useful in determining the features of the intersection that
have an impact on safety. A complete system would automatically detect
and record traffic conditions associated with accidents such as time of
the accident, video of the accident, and the traffic light signal controller
parameters. The basic research required to develop the system is con-
sidered. This involves developing methods for processing acoustic sig-
nals and recognizing accident events from the background traffic
events. A database of vehicle crash sounds, car braking sounds, con-
struction sounds, and traffic sounds was created. The mel-frequency
cepstral coefficients were computed as a feature vector for input to the
classification system. A neural network was used to classify these fea-
tures into categories of crash and noncrash events. The classification
testing results achieved 99 percent accuracy.
In this research the authors consider the development of a system
for automatically detecting and reporting traffic accidents. Such a
device could be useful at high-traffic intersections where accidents
are likely to occur. These intersections will usually have signal
lights for traffic control. A complete system would automatically
detect and record traffic conditions associated with accidents such
as time of the accident, video of the accident, and the traffic light
signal controller parameters. A system with these properties would
be beneficial in determining the cause of accidents. The informa-
tion could also be useful in determining features of the intersection
that have an impact on safety.
In this project the basic research required to develop a system to
detect accidents was considered. This involved developing methods
for processing acoustic signals and recognizing accident events from
the background traffic events that occur at intersections. If methods
can be developed for reliably recognizing accident events at intersec-
tions, then a system can be developed with complete functionality. An
acoustic system was chosen for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness.
It is also the case that accidents create distinctive sound events.
At the present time a device to detect accidents and report traffic
signal conditions does not exist. Work has been conducted on video
systems to monitor traffic conditions and provide input to signal
controllers for traffic control (1, 2). Video systems have also been
used for incident detection (3). Incidents are detected when a vehi-
cle stops or dramatically reduces its speed. The system proposed in
this work will seek to determine accidents directly from the acoustic
signal of the accident. The system is relatively simple because an
acoustic signal rather than a video signal is being processed. The
accident detection system can operate in a stand-alone configuration
or, alternately, provide complementary information when other
sensors are available.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
■ Transportation Research Record 1746
Consider the problem of determining vehicle accidents from
acoustic signals. The problem of identifying vehicle accidents from
acoustic records may be stated generically as an object identifica-
tion problem. The objects to be recognized in this situation are
vehicle accidents that must be distinguished from the background
traffic and other environmental noise. The 1-D signal in this case
would be audio measurements of vehicular traffic. An important
step in object identification is to determine measurements that can
form the basis for a classification system. These measurements
form a feature vector that is the input to a classification system. It
is necessary for each object to be identified to have distinguishable
feature vectors. In this application, it is necessary for accidents to be
detected from the feature vector extracted from the acoustic signal.
There are several factors that complicate the object recognition
process. One problem is the communication channel that will vary
even if the object is the same. That is, sensors placed in different
environments will behave somewhat differently. They will produce
different signals for the same vehicle crash. Different traffic inter-
sections and different weather conditions will affect the signals and
distort the feature vectors for the objects. Another complication is
that objects in the same class, for example, collisions of the same
type, will produce somewhat different signals. Finally, noise and
multiple signals from different sources will distort the signals.
There are many different sources of acoustic signals that may occur
at different intersections. These include normal traffic sounds, large
trucks, and other vehicles that produce loud sounds in normal opera-
tion. There may also be construction, maintenance, and industrial
activity in the vicinity. In addition, various types of accidents may
occur. Vehicles may crash into other vehicles or stationary objects.
Vehicles may have head-on, rear-end, or side collisions. There may
be braking sounds, tires skidding, and horns.
BACKGROUND
Most of the work in classifying acoustic signals has been done in
association with speech recognition (4, 5). A number of methods
have been explored for extracting measurements from the acoustic
signal. A common method used is the mel-warped cepstra trans-
form. The mel-scale is based on the nonlinear human perception of
sound frequencies (6, 7). Cepstral coefficients are often the pre-
ferred measurements extracted from an acoustic signal for speech
recognition (4).
Acoustic data have been used in traffic monitoring (1). The goal was
to count the vehicles in traffic patterns on roadways. The system was
found to perform better when located closer to the traffic and away
from echo-producing structures such as bridges. It was affected
somewhat by cold weather. High traffic volumes caused under-
counting. Other technologies such as passive infrared, radar, and
Doppler microwave had better performance at vehicle counting.
Although acoustic technology is not the best for counting vehicles, it
Harlow and Wang Paper No. 01-2453 91

has a role in detecting accidents. Accidents are more likely to have a Feature Extraction
distinctive acoustic signal than individual vehicles in a traffic stream.
Consider the problem of extracting features from the acoustic signal.
An audio signal can be characterized by the short-time Fourier spec-
trum of a signal (6, 10). The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is
METHODOLOGY defined as
This section provides descriptions of the data used in the study and ∞
the manner in which they were acquired, the features that were
extracted from the acoustic samples, and the neural network classi-
sˆ( w ) = ∫ s(t )g(t ) exp(− j 2πtw)dt
−∞

fication approach.
Vehicle Accident Database Formation
The authors developed an acoustic database of traffic sounds, con-
struction sounds, and accident sounds. The information contained in
the database consists of accident location, acoustic records, a descrip-
tion of the event (type of accident) and vehicles involved, and envi-
ronmental information. The equipment used in the field for recording
vehicle acoustic signals consisted of sound-recording equipment and
a form to manually enter information related to the event. The
acoustic equipment consisted of a Larson-Davis Model 712 sound
level meter, Electro-Voice RE55 microphones, and a Sony TCD-D8
DAT Walkman. The sound data were recorded on the DAT recorder
at 44.1 kHz.
Acoustic data of accidents are difficult to obtain. Arrangements
were made with the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) Crash Test
Facility located in College Station, Texas, to collect data of vehicle
crashes. The authors recorded traffic sounds at intersections and con-
struction sounds from construction sites in Baton Rouge to complete
the database. The traffic sounds were recorded at an intersection with
a high volume of traffic, including a substantial amount of large truck
traffic. The total amount of data available for analysis and testing con-
sisted of 28 crash sounds from vehicle crashes, 2 car braking sounds,
8 sounds of a pile driver at a construction site, and 200 sound records
of routine traffic at intersections. The crash sounds consisted of small
cars, regular-size cars, pickups, and large delivery trucks hitting crash
barriers of different types and, in some cases, a rear-end collision.
Because the accident data were recorded at a crash test facility, the
word “crash” is often used to refer to an accident.
Sound data are often processed in the root mean square (rms) of the
sound signal pressure p(t). The form is
where g(t) is a windowing function. The function g should have
support over a finite time interval so that it localizes the response
in time. One common form for g is the Gaussian function
 (t − µ ) 
2
g(t ) = exp − 
 2σ 2 
The Hamming window (11) where
2 πn 
g(n) = 0.54 − .46 cos 0 ≤ n < N
 N − 1
is often used in acoustic processing.
A common method used for feature extraction is the mel-warped
cepstra transform. Let FFT be the fast Fourier transform and FFT −1
be its inverse. Let s be the signal over a frame, then the cepstra
transform is cep(s) = FFT −1(log|FFT(s)|). Since (log|FFT(s)|) is real
and symmetric, the FFT and FFT−1 are equal up to a multiplicative
constant. The cepstrum is, therefore, the spectrum of the log of the
spectrum. The mel-warped spectrum is obtained by attenuating
high frequencies in (log|FFT(s)|) before taking the inverse trans-
form. The mel-scale is based on the nonlinear human perception
of sound frequencies (6, 7 ). Generally, about 10 to 14 of the low
cepstral coefficients are required for recognition. The use of the
cepstra has often proved an effective approach in audio object
recognition tasks (5).
Figure 1 shows the sound prms signal from a vehicle crash. The
data here have been significantly reduced from the raw sound data
collected for plotting purposes. Figure 2 is a plot of a sound signal

1
∫
T2
prms = p 2 (t )dt
T2 − T1 T1

The term Lp refers to the logarithmic form

 p
Lp = 20 log10  
 p0 

with units of decibels. The equivalent continuous sound level

over a specified time interval is defined as (8)

p 
Leq = 20 log10  rms 
 p0 

It is important to relate these basic units to the data obtained from

the recording system (9). FIGURE 1 Vehicle crash sound signal.
92 Paper No. 01-2453
FIGURE 2 Normal traffic sound signal.
from normal traffic at an intersection. All the sound signals were
saved in “wav” format at intervals 3 s in length each and were sam-
pled at 22.05 kHz. To reduce the calculations during the signal
processing, the data were resampled to 8 kHz, which proved ade-
quate. A Hamming window function is applied to every 100-ms
frame of the data with a 50-ms frame overlapping. The FFT is
applied to the signal, and data are retained corresponding to the
largest frequency allowed for the sampling rate of 8,000 Hz. The
inverse FFT of this signal is taken to get the cepstral coefficients.
Only the first few cepstral coefficients give detailed signal compo-
nents. The rest of the coefficients provide the envelope information
of the signal. The first 12 cepstral coefficients are used as the input
for the neural network. An improvement over the mel-frequency cep-
stral coefficients (MFCCs) is accomplished by applying linear filter-
ing to the signal after taking the FFT and before taking the logarithm.
Nonlinear filter banks are then applied on the cepstrum.
Overview of Feature
Extraction and Classification
The following are the basic steps in the processing of the sound sig-
nals. First, the sound events to be classified are digitized. Second,
the first 12 MFCCs that represent the spectral-domain content of the
sound are computed. These features are computed over small time
intervals of the signal called a frame. Third, a feed-forward neural
network is used to classify these features into categories of crash and
noncrash at each frame.
Classification with Neural Networks
Consider signal classification, which is the process of identifying the
object associated with a given input signal. Once the features have
been extracted from the input data, there will be an n-dimensional
feature vector that is the input to a classifier. Neural networks were
selected for the classifier for their power and convenience, since a
number of implementations are readily available. The Matlab Neural
Network Toolbox was used for the implementation (12).
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) attempt to solve complex prob-
lems with an architecture that mimics the nervous system. ANNs are
mathematical systems that are comprised of a number of processing
Transportation Research Record 1746
units that are linked via weighted interconnections (13). A process-
ing unit is an equation that is often referred to as a transfer function.
A processing unit takes weighted signals from other neurons and
combines them, transforms them, and outputs a numeric result. An
individual computational element sums input values, which produces
a nonlinear output. Large assemblies of these simple elements can
solve problems requiring massive constraint satisfaction. ANNs have
the additional advantage of learning the optimal connection weights
between processing elements. This learning process eliminates the
tedious programming that often accompanies complex problems.
ANNs can be grouped into simple-layer and multiple-layer nets.
They may have a number of hidden layers between the input and the
output layer. Backpropagation (BP) neural networks are probably the
most common neural architecture implemented today. BP networks
are multilayer feed-forward networks. Data flow in one direction,
thus “feed-forward,” and have multiple layers, thus “multilayer.” BP
is actually an iterative gradient descent learning algorithm used to set
the weights.
One reason BP neural networks are so common is because they
perform relatively well on a wide variety of applications (13). They
can also be used for functional modeling, classification, diagnostic,
and time series types of applications. Probabilistic neural networks
(PNNs) also can be used as classifiers, but they require many data.
Because of a limitation of data, the authors chose the BP as their
classifier with one hidden layer.
Classifier Implementation
The sound database was composed of 28 vehicle crash samples,
200 normal traffic samples, and 10 samples classified as “other.”
The TTI collected the crash samples, and the normal traffic sounds
were recorded from a local intersection. These traffic samples
include various types of vehicles such as passenger cars, pickups,
trucks, buses, and motorcycles. The authors also collected some car
braking sounds as well as pile driving sounds from a construction
site and placed these samples in the classification named “other.”
The classification stage consisted of two steps. The first step was
the training of the neural network. Part of the available samples
detailed above were used as training samples. The authors trained the
neural network with the features extracted from each training sample
where the network knows the desired output. The neural network
adjusted the weight matrix during the training according to the input
and output pairs to reach the minimum error. The second step was
testing; once the training was completed, the system was tested with
the remaining test data as samples.
After the features were extracted, they were rearranged in the
required format of the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox as the
inputs to a feed-forward neural network. A threshold was set for
the minimum signal strength so that weak sound signals would not
be processed, thus avoiding the expense of unnecessary computa-
tions. Only two classification results were considered: crash or
noncrash.
Classification Experiments
The neural network was trained and tested with frame lengths set at
20, 32, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 ms. It was shown that a shorter
frame length gives better classification results. The results suggested
use of a 20-, 32-, or 100-ms frame length. It was decided to use a
100-ms frame length because the 20- and 32-ms frame lengths take
longer to process.
Harlow and Wang
The features were extracted from the frames in the order that the
frame appears in the sound record. Each set of features extracted from
a frame was fed into the network for classification. Weak sound sig-
nals were detected and ignored. Some of the frames of the crash sig-
nal may have been mistakenly classified because the training samples
do not represent all possible patterns of a crash. Thus, a method was
employed to remove the misclassified parts of the signal and give a
correct final decision. The total number of frames labeled a crash and
the total number of frames labeled a noncrash were computed. If the
total number of frames labeled a crash sound were greater than the
number of frames labeled noncrash, then the signal for classification
purposes was considered a crash sound. Otherwise, it was considered
a noncrash sound.
In the final experiment, the 100-ms frame length was used. The
training samples were selected such that the number of training and
crash sounds was the same. This experiment used 16 crash sounds,
16 traffic sounds, 1 braking sound, and 1 pile-driving sound for train-
ing. Once the neural network was trained, the performance of the net-
work was tested by using the test data. The test data had 184 traffic
samples, 12 crash samples, and 8 other sounds. The classification
errors are shown below:
Category Crash Sounds Traffic Sounds Other Sounds
Crash Sounds 0 0 0
Traffic Sounds 2 0 0 tion. James Manning, who works with the city of Durham, North
Other Sounds 0 0 0 Carolina, suggested the value of an acoustic system for detecting
The detection rate (true positives) was 100 percent. All the crash
sounds were correctly classified. The test of the traffic samples has
only two mistakenly classified samples. The other data sounds,
including car braking and pile-driving sounds, were classified with-
out any error. The false alarm rate (false positives) was 1 percent;
two traffic sounds were classified as crash sounds.
The authors processed data in 3-s intervals and classified the data
as crash or noncrash events. The false alarm rate was low, but there
was nevertheless potential for generating a substantial number of
false alarms. For example, if one assumes that 30 percent of the sig-
nals have sufficient acoustic power to be classified, then one would
process 360 acoustic records in 1 h. With a false alarm rate of 1 per-
cent, this could generate four false alarms per hour. The classifica-
tion of a sound as an accident would imply that relevant information
about the accident such as traffic signal settings would be recorded.
If an actual accident had been reported, then the data would be avail-
able for review. If no accident had been reported, this might still
mean that an accident had occurred. For safety studies, one would
need to review the data to determine the actual conditions that
caused the sound event. It is possible that the false alarm rate may
need to be further reduced. Experience with the system would be
required to determine the required rate.
CONCLUSIONS
This project has demonstrated a promising approach for developing
an acoustic system for automatically detecting and reporting traffic
accidents at intersections. The system needs to be further evaluated
in situations with normal traffic flow and accident occurrences. The
data were not obtained under a wide variety of environmental con-
ditions as would be encountered in practice because crash tests are
not normally conducted under adverse weather conditions. It has
previously been observed in tests of equipment used for counting
vehicles that the equipment is affected by environmental conditions,
traffic conditions, lighting conditions, and intersection geometry.
Paper No. 01-2453 93
Acoustic detectors were affected by snow, extreme cold, and heavy
traffic and may be affected by location (1). The acoustic sensor must
be located near the intersection. The acoustic sensor was located
near the signal controller box. It would be useful to obtain more data
under a wide variety of conditions. Building a prototype system and
installing it at intersections for further data collection and evalua-
tion could accomplish this. The classification system has been con-
structed so that it can be readily trained as new data are obtained.
Larger training sets would make the classification more reliable.
The system should be cost-effective. The cost of a system
depends very much on the vendor and the size of the market. Any
modern PC or digital signal processing unit could meet the pro-
cessing requirements. The necessary computing and sound equip-
ment can be purchased for under $1,000, with the price decreasing
every year.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the Louisiana Transportation Research
Center. The Texas Transportation Institute Crash Test Facility located
in College Station, Texas, assisted the authors in obtaining acoustic
data of vehicle crashes. Dick Zimmer allowed the authors to collect
data at the facility, and Richard Badillo helped with the data collec-
traffic accidents.
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The contents of this paper reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible
for the facts and accuracy of the data presented. The contents do not necessarily
reflect the official views or policies of the Louisiana Department of Transportation
and Development or the Louisiana Transportation Research Center. This report
does not constitute a standard, specification, or regulation.
Publication of this paper sponsored by Committee on Safety Data, Analysis, and
Evaluation.