Description

Vision-based trajectory analysis of road users enables identification of near-crash situations and proactive safety monitoring. The two most widely used sur-rogate safety measures (SSMs), time-to-collision (TTC) and post-encroachment time (PET)—and a recent variant form of TTC, relative time-to-collision (RTTC)—were investigated using real-world video data collected at ten signalized intersections in the city of San Diego, California. The performance of these SSMs was compared for the purpose of evaluating pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Prediction of potential trajectory intersection points was performed to calculate TTC for every interacting object, and the average of TTC for every two objects in critical situations was calculated. PET values were estimated by observing potential intersection points, and frequencies of events were estimated in three critical levels. Although RTTC provided useful information regarding the relative distance between objects in time, it was found that in certain conditions where objects are far from each other, the interaction between the objects was incorrectly flagged as critical based on a small RTTC. Comparison of PET, TTC, and RTTC for different critical classes also showed that several interactions were identified as critical using one SSM but not critical using a different SSM. These findings suggest that safety evaluations should not solely rely on a single SSM, and instead a combination of different SSMs should be considered to ensure the reliability of evaluations. Video data analysis was conducted to develop object detection and tracking models for automatic identification of vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians. Outcomes of machine vision models were employed along with SSMs to build a decision support system for safety assessment of vulnerable road users at signalized intersections. Promising results from the decision support system showed that automated safety evaluations can be performed to proactively identify critical events. It also showed challenges as well as future directions to enhance the performance of the system.

Publication Date

3-2020

Publication Type

Report

Topic

Transportation Technology

Digital Object Identifier

10.31979/mti.2020.1853

MTI Project

1853

Keywords

Proactive safety monitoring, Safety surrogate measures, Visual trajectory analysis, Signalized intersection safety, Vulnerable road users

Disciplines

Civil Engineering | Computer and Systems Architecture | Transportation Engineering

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