VEHICLE ACCIDENT AND TRAFFIC CLASSIFICATION USING DEEP

CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

BULBULA KUMEDA1, ZHANG FENGLI1, ARIYO OLUWASANMI1, FORSTER OWUSU1, MAREGU ASSEFA1,
TEMESGEN AMENU2
1
School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu
610054, China,
2
School of Management, University of Electronics Science and Technology of China Chengdu, 610054, China,
E-MAIL: bulbula2017@std.uestc.edu.cn, fzhang@uestc.edu.cn, ariyo@std.uestc.edu.cn, forster362@gmail.com,
maregu2006@gmail.com, konsotempreture@yahoo.com

Abstract: learning is a very good approach that plays a vital role in

Road Traffic accident is a horrifying and terrifying
phenomenon which is the main cause of death of more than 1.35
million people and injuries to over 50 million people per year.
The global economic loss caused by road traffic accidents
annually is estimated at 518 billion US dollars. In this work, we
investigate the categorization of traffic and accident images
according to their content, features, and semantics using deep
learning techniques. The availability of appropriate data
representation enhances the performance of deep neural
networks in feature extraction using supervised domain
knowledge of the data to create valuable pattern understanding.
In this work, we have gone through the classification of images
using CNN techniques and categorize images into four
predefined classes i.e. Accident, Dense Traffic, Fire, and Sparse
Traffic. Our deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model
learning the mapping of the input images to their labeled classes
and show good generalization to the test dataset. Experimental
results on real-world datasets have shown that the proposed
CNN method is effective for accident and traffic classification,
and can perform the task with an accuracy of 94.4% on four
target traffic and accident classes.
Keywords:
Convolutional neural network; Image classification;
Traffic accident; Deep learning; Neural network; Pattern
recognition
1. Introduction
Machine learning is a scientific study which concerns
with the designing and developing of statistical models and
algorithms with the ability of programs to perform a
particular task without using explicit instructions, which is to
modify its implementation based on the newly acquired data.
Machine learning algorithms are used to analyze the data,
extract hidden patterns, and make predictions based on the
summarized information in a suitable format. Machine
variety of data-driven decision-making processes, and is the
most effective approach with rapid growth which brings a
tremendous influence on our day to day life with such
examples of machine learning for rainfall forecasting,
prediction of bankruptcy, forecasting weather, optical
character recognition, and self-driving system, etc. [1-2].
Nowadays the breach between the abilities of human
and machines are getting too closer or bridged by proving an
immense growth of Artificial Intelligence. Currently,
researchers in the field of AI are working on enormous parts
of the field to achieve amazing things happen such as Video
& Image identification, Analysis & Classification of Image,
Recreation of Media, Natural Language Processing,
Recommendation Systems, etc. [3]. Most of the progress that
uses Deep learning for computer vision has been made and
accomplished with time, mostly over one specific algorithm
— Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) [4].
Artificial neural networks (ANN) are enthused by the
biological neural system designed to recognize patterns. It is
a machine learning algorithm that is known as a data
modeling tool in classification and prediction. Neural
networks are composed of individual units called neurons,
which are found in a series of groups called Layers. The input
data in each node make a simple mathematical computation
and transmits the data to the next node which is connected to
them.
Currently, the best and powerful algorithms for
automated processing of images we have are CNNs, and they
are used by many different companies, to do tasks like
identifying objects in an image, image localization, and other
pattern recognition tasks. CNN has been a popular direction
of research in machine learning and image processing with
the biggest features of automatically extracting visual
characteristics and lessen calculation time [5].

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 The task of image classification deeply relies on a
successful computer vision system. Hence, we take an in-
depth study examination of an image classification system
for our computer vision-based task using deep learning. We
review the current works in the detection and classification
of images using CNN. Finally, we analyze the use of the
convolutional neural network in deep architectures and their
application to traffic accident image classification.
In this work, we have used a traffic accident image
dataset called Traffic-Net that is found at [6]. This dataset is
gathered to make sure that it is possible to use machine
learning methods that can be trained to identify traffic
situations and provide real-time observation, analytic and
warnings. The dataset has 4,400 images that have four
classes where every class has 1,100 images.
2. Related Works
Currently, CNN is the best and most powerful image
processing technique with great learning ability largely due
to the use of several feature extraction phases (hidden layers)
that can automatically learn representations from the data.
The improvement in high data processing hardware devices
and the increase in a massive amount of dataset has
accelerated the research in CNNs, and in recent times a very
inspiring deep CNN architectures are stated. A traffic
accident is the most wide-spreading phenomenon in the
whole world which are resulting in the death of precious
human beings and huge loss of economic assets. Recently
different researchers and scholars are seriously focusing to
minimize and prevent the life-threatening traffic accidents
through the application of data mining and machine learning
techniques
To detect the factors that are highly leading to fatal
accidents the work in [7] used a Convolutional Neural
Networks by efficiently clustering records and considering
suitable features. To identify the incidence of the accident,
various features like speed limit, injury severity, and time of
the accident, drunk driver, month, and weather during the
accident, human factors, and light conditions are considered.
The work in [8] used a deep learning technique,
Convolutional Neural Networks in the urban network to
automatically detect traffic incidents using traffic flow data.
The experimental result depicts that the CNN approach used
in this work is effective and superior in detecting the rate of
the incident over the traditional neural networks. The authors
also stated that accident detection using deep learning
methods can enhance the accuracy of incident detection in
urban networks.
A novel road traffic accident prediction model called
Traffic accident Prediction using Convolutional Neural
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Network (TAP-CNN) is applied in [9] determining issues
like, light, weather, traffic flow, to form a state matrix to
depict the traffic state and CNN model. CNN was used to
establish the TAP-CNN model to deliver a reference to
predict the traffic accident. Whereas the work in [10] used
Traffic Accident Severity Prediction based on CNN (TASP-
CNN) to solve the problems in accident severity through
analysis of the detailed combination relationships among the
characteristics of the traffic accidents that highly affect the
severity of the accident. The authors proposed a Feature
Matrix to Gray Image algorithm based on the weights of
traffic accident features. The experimental outcomes of this
work depict that the proposed model has a good prediction
performance of the accident severity.
In [11] the authors used a Fast-Convolutional Neural
Networks (F-CNN) to predict the future traffic flow with
uncertain accident data. In this work, a fuzzy inference
system (FIS) is applied for the first time to indicate the traffic
accident characteristics when presenting unspecified traffic
accident information to CNN, which relieves the restrictions
of traffic data. This [12] paper used a deep convolutional
neural network to detect traffic accidents through feature
extraction together with the combination of experts for
classification. There are two tasks in this work, In the first
task, the authors used the output of the last max-pooling layer
of CNN to extract the hidden features automatically. For the
second task, they used a combination of advanced variations
of extreme learning machine (ELM). The proposed system
in this work is very significant for online processing accident
images that are taken by any surveillance systems like
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The research works in
[13-14] used a Deep CNN and Fast learning CNN models for
the classification of images. While the work in [15] used an
enhanced Fast learning Shallow CNN model that’s is
designed to allow fast training and low implementation
complexity. The method is qualified by convolutional filters,
use of least squares regression, randomly-valued classifier-
stage input weights, and linear classifier-stage output units.
The recent advancements in the convolutional neural
networks have been stated by [16] and discussed the great
performance of CNN in several fields such as image
classification, pattern recognition, and multimedia
compression. Here also the work in [17] reviewed the
enhancements of CNN in various aspects like layer design,
activation function, loss function, regularization,
optimization, and fast computation. They also introduced the
different applications of CNN in computer vision, speech,
and natural language processing. Nowadays CNN is used to
analyze and detect medical images to enhance the medical
process through achieving an accurate result. Some of the
researches used CNN to mitosis detection of breast cancer,
breast cancer image classification using a dataset for breast
histopathological images, and a two-phase deep CNN for
lessening class lopsidedness in histopathological images-
based breast cancer recognition [18-21].
3. Vehicle Accident Classifier
Neural networks based on deep learning techniques are
potentially powerful for classification and pattern
recognition which deeply relies on a successful computer
vision system. Neural networks comprise of three basic
layers:
Input layers: - carries the initial input data into the
model for further processing by succeeding layers of
artificial neurons.
Hidden layers: - a layer to transform the given input into
something that the output layer understands. A hidden layer
is between the input layers and output layers, where a neuron
receives a weighted input and yields an output through
activation functions.
Output layers: - the final layer of the artificial neurons,
which produces the given output from the hidden layer of the
model.
Fig.1 A neural network having two hidden layers adapted
from [22]
3.1. Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet/CNN)
CNN is a component of the deep neural network. As
previously described above, neural networks contain several
artificial neurons, which are the foundation of the algorithm
intelligence. The development of CNN has shown advanced
improvements for the last five years. Companies like Google,
Amazon, and Facebook use CNN for searching user photos,
for generating product recommendations and automatic
photo tagging algorithms respectively.
CNN is capable to distinguish a given an input image
one from another, assign significance learnable weights and
biases to several objects of an image. The ConvNet is highly
enthused by the organization of Visual Cortex for image
classification and has analogous architecture that of the
connectivity pattern of Neurons in the human brain. Its main
purpose is to minimize or lessen the images into a form that
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is easier to process without losing characteristics which are
vital for acquiring a better prediction and accelerating
training speed [23].
CNNs are a feed-forward neural network that learns to
recognize patterns across space and thus, it learns to identify
components or patterns in an image or frames of video like
curves, edges, and lines, etc. The hidden layer on CNN can
do different tasks using four basic mechanisms namely,
convolutional layer, ReLU layer, pooling layer, and fully
connected layer.
3.1.1. Convolution Layer
This layer is always the first step in CNN which can be
supposed as the core building block of CNN. In this layer,
the neurons appear for particular characteristics which will
later make the neurons to raise high activation. By feeding
the input image through a set of convolutional filters, the
convolution layer is used to activate the certain characteristic
of the image where each layer enables different
characteristics from the image. In this layer has a parameter
which consists of a set of learnable filters or kernels which
has a small accessible field, but spread through the full depth
of the input size. In terms of signal processing jargon,
convolution can be supposed as a weighted sum between two
signals. The output of the first layer becomes the input for
the next layer when it passes through the convolution layer.
This layer passes the information on to the next layer by
applying a convolution operation to the input. The sum of the
element-wise multiplication of the kernel (filter) and the
novel image is called Convolution [24].
A problem of employing convolutional layers is that it
lessens the output map size. The smaller sized output is
produced from a large stride. Equations (1) depict the
connection between output size O and input size of an image
I after convolution with pace s and kernel K. Additionally,
the size of the feature map is inversely proportional to the
number of convolutional layers. Means, when the number of
conv layers is increased the feature map size, gets smaller
and smaller. Row output size (𝑂𝑥 and column output size
𝑂𝑦 of convolutional layers are specified as follows:
Ox =
1x − K x
+ 1, Oy =
1y − K y
+ 1,
(1)
S S
3.1.2. ReLU Layer
It is known as the rectified linear unit which is another
step to our convolution layer used to apply the non-saturating
activation function𝑓(𝑥) = max(0, 𝑥). . From an activation
map, it effectively removes negative values by setting them
to zero make the network to learn faster and work more
efficient. Without affecting the accessible fields of the
convolution layer, the ReLU layer increases the nonlinear
properties of the overall network and the decision layers.
This is because images themselves are highly non-linear.
3.1.3. Pooling Layer
It is one of the layers of CNN which is known as a
downsampling layer and works with the width and height of
the image. It is widely and instantly used layer after the
convolutional layer to lessen the width and height of the
picture. Pooling is used to lessen the number of needed
parameters and the size of computation required. Using
fewer parameters helps to control and avoid overfitting.

Fig.2 The architecture of CNN for accident image classification

weight from the jth neuron in (𝑙 − 1 the layer to the ith
neuron in the ith layer.
To detect an object from an image no matter where an image
is located, pooling gradually lessens the size of the input
3.1.5. Model Design
picture. Max pooling is the most common and widely used
form of pooling that takes a filter size of 𝐹 × 𝐹and uses the
In our work, our model consisted of four convolutional
maximum procedure over the 𝐹 × 𝐹sized part of the image.
layers and three fully connected layers. The first two
convolutional layers were followed with max-pooling
3.1.4. Fully Connected Layer
operations. All the CNN filters were set to a size of
3 × 3 with a stride of 2. Also, the pooling filters were set to
A fully connected layer is a collection of series of fully
size 2 × 2 and a stride of 2 on both width and length. Each
connected layers. A fully connected layer can be represented
layer has a relu activation and the following batch
with the function from ℝ m to ℝ n. Each output dimension
normalization function. The two starting layers have 32
depends on each input dimension. To cluster feature maps,
filters each, while the later layers have 64 filters. The dense
CNN needs classification layers especially in depicting
layers have 128, 64 and 1 nodes respectively, with a SoftMax
massive data [25].
activation function on the output layer.
The fully connected layers in CNN are basically a
multilayer perceptron (MLP) that targets to map the
(𝑙−1) (𝑙−1) (𝑙−1) 4. Result and Discussion
𝑚1 × 𝑚2 × 𝑚3 activation volume from the
combination of preceding various layers into a class Using Adam optimizer and a learning rate of 0.001 at
likelihood distribution. Therefore, the output layer of the 100 epochs, the model’s cost function was computed using
(𝑙−𝑖)
MLP will have 𝑚1 outputs; where i denote the number cross entropy with a batch size of 32. The model produced
of layers. If 𝑙 − 1 is a fully connected layer; an efficient result on the traffic-net dataset with a training
𝑚
(𝑙−1)
(𝑙) (𝑙−1) accuracy of 94.4% and a test accuracy of 91.64%. Fig.3 and
𝑦𝑖𝑙 = 𝑓(∑𝑗=1
1
𝑤𝑖,𝑗 𝑌𝑖 ) (2) 4 below shows the learning curve of our model as the cost
Where 𝑚𝑙 _lindicates the number of neurons in the lth function of the model prediction against the ground truth is
hidden layer. The activation function is denoted by f and optimized using backpropagation.
(𝑙)
weight parameters are represented as w where 𝑤𝑖,𝑗 is the From the images, the training loss could be seen

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depicting the converges of the cost function. We believe the
reason why the model achieves high accuracy is because of
the invariant property of the CNN architecture, which is able
to extract spatial features from images by learning curves and
edges at the initial layers before combining them into
meaningful shapes and patterns at subsequent layers.
Currently, there is no published work using the Traffic-
Net dataset, but a network was trained using a pretrained
ResNet50 model to perform prediction on the dataset which
is provided in the GitHub repository [6]. The author has
stated the result of a trained ResNet model on the four classes
of the 800 test images which achieves a test accuracy of
91.64%. Compared to our model, our model has performed
better on both the training and the test results with a test
accuracy of 91.64% also, we recorded an accurate training of
94.4%.
Table 1 Test on CNN model
Batch Learnin Number model Training
size g rate of epochs Accuracy
32 0.001 100 CNN 94.4%
The results in Table 1 show that as for the Traffic-Net
traffic and accident image classification, our original neural
network model performs well achieving the accuracy rate of
94.4%.
5. Conclusion
In this work, we have proposed a deep convolutional
neural network (CNN), currently which takes advantage of
recent deep learning models in vehicle detection and
recognition to detect traffic accidents from the given image
datasets. The model is trained for classification of images
using a Traffic-Net dataset which contains 4,400 images
where 1,100 images for each category, with 900 images for
training and 200 images for testing. This dataset is gathered
in order to ensure that machine learning systems can be
trained to notice traffic situations and provide real-time
monitoring, analytics, and alerts. We categorize images into
four predefined classes i.e. Accident, Dense Traffic, Fire, and
Sparse Traffic. Our deep Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) model learns the mapping of the input images to their
labeled classes and shows good generalization to the test
dataset. Our proposed model consists of four convolutional
Test
accuracy layers and three fully connected layers. This model was
91.64% trained for 100 epochs only, but it achieved 94.4% training
accuracy on 800 test images with a learning rate of 0.001.
From our experimental results obtained by applying our
proposed model on real-world datasets, we can conclude that
our CNN model is effective for image classification and can
perform the task with an accuracy of 94.4% on four target
accident classes.

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