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Proactive Safety Monitoring: A Functional Approach to Detect Safety-Related

Anomalies Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Video Data

Article in Transportation Research Part C Emerging Technologies · April 2021

DOI: 10.1016/j.trc.2021.103130

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2021.103130

Proactive Safety Monitoring: A Functional Approach to Detect Safety-Related Anomalies Using

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Video Data

Di Yang, Kaan Ozbay, Kun Xie, Hong Yang, Fan Zuo, Di Sha

Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, New York University, 15 MetroTech Center 6th Floor, Brooklyn, NY,
11201, USA, dy855@nyu.edu
Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, New York University, 15 MetroTech Center 6th Floor, Brooklyn, NY,
11201, USA, kaan.ozbay@nyu.edu
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Old Dominion University (ODU), 129C Kaufman Hall, Norfolk,
VA 23529, USA, kxie@odu.edu
Department of Computational Modeling and Simulation Engineering, Old Dominion University, 4700 Elkhorn Ave,
Norfolk, VA 23529, USA, hyang@odu.edu
Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, New York University, 15 MetroTech Center 6 th Floor, Brooklyn, NY,
11201, USA, fz380@nyu.edu
Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, New York University, 15 MetroTech Center 6th Floor, Brooklyn, NY,
11201, USA, ds5317@nyu.edu

Keywords: Outlier Detection; Functional Data Analysis; Functional Depth; Surrogate Safety Measures;
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle;

Abstract
The advent of smart cities has motivated the field of transportation safety to transition towards a proactive
approach that anticipates and mitigates risks before crashes occur. One of the stepping-stones to complete
this transition is to monitor the risk levels of the transportation roadway system continuously. With the
advancement in emerging technologies, computer-vision-based safety analysis approaches that focus on
risk assessment using traffic conflicts quantified by surrogate safety measures extracted from traffic
videos have been proposed. As the detailed movements of all the vehicles are logged in the video data, the
quantified traffic conflicts can depict the whole picture of risk levels for a specific location. However, the
capability of using traffic videos and the quantified traffic conflicts for proactive safety monitoring has
yet to be investigated widely. In addition, one of the limitations of past safety research is that safety-
related data are mostly aggregated into summary statistics (such as the total number of crashes/conflicts),
which constitutes a major simplification of the real risk levels that change over time.

Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by proposing a novel functional approach that models
time series of a variant of the time exposed time-to-collision safety indicator directly to detect safety-
related anomalies from traffic video data. Functional data smoothing methods that can mitigate overfitting
and account for the nonnegative characteristics of safety indicator are applied. Nine commonly used
functional anomaly detection methods are summarized and compared using approximately one-hour of
traffic video data recorded by an unmanned aerial vehicle at a signalized intersection. Ground truth
safety-related anomalies are identified by manually reviewing the video data, which is used to validate the
performances of anomaly detection methods. Good separation between safety-related anomalies and non-
anomalies (0.85 area under the receiver operating characteristics and 0.8 area under the precision-recall
curve) has been found. By applying the proposed safety-related anomaly detection method, significant
amount of human resources can be liberated.

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