Efficient Deep Learning Methods for Detecting Road Accidents by Analyzing Traffic Accident Images

Speed is one of the major factors in car crashes. Many lives could have been saved if emergency services had been alerted to the disaster and arrived in time. For the sake of protecting valuable human lives, an effective automatic accident detection system with prompt reporting of the accident scene to emergency services is essential. Therefore, this research proposes some effective Deep Learning techniques that properly recognize the incidence of accidents. The paper introduces two different techniques for image classification, with a particular focus on distinguishing between accident and non-accident images. The dataset used for the proposed model is taken from Kaggle, which is a collection of CCTV images. The first approach is a hybridized TL-ML method that employs transfer learning techniques that use different pre-trained versions of convolutional neural networks to extract features from image datasets. These extracted features are then fed into various machine learning classifiers to categorize the images as either Accident or Non-accident. To make the final decision, a voting classifier is utilized to choose the best classification outcome from the set of previously employed machine learning classifiers. In the second method, a modified Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) called SpinalNet is adopted. The performance of these models was evaluated by comparing them with each other and with a customized CNN base model. SpinalNet consistently surpassed the other models in terms of Precision, Recall, F1-Score, and Accuracy, demonstrating its outstanding capabilities.