TAD: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Traffic Accidents Detection From Video Surveillance

Automatic traffic accident detection has attracted the attention of the machine vision community for the rapid development of autonomous intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, previous studies in this domain have been constrained by small-scale datasets with limited scope, impeding their effectiveness and applicability. Specifically, highway traffic accidents, often resulting in severe consequences due to higher speeds, require a more comprehensive approach to detection. The use of video surveillance provides a unique perspective, capturing the entire accident sequence. Unfortunately, existing traffic accident datasets are either not sourced from surveillance cameras, not publicly available, or not tailored for highway scenarios. An open-sourced traffic accident dataset with various scenes from surveillance cameras is in great need and of practical importance. To fulfill the above urgent need, we endeavor to collect abundant video data of real traffic accidents and propose a large-scale traffic accidents dataset, named TAD. Various experiments on image classification, video classification, and object detection tasks, using public mainstream vision algorithms or frameworks are conducted in this work to demonstrate the performance of different methods. The proposed dataset together with the experimental results are presented as a new benchmark to improve computer vision research, especially in ITS. The dataset is publicly available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/TADBench</uri>.