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\section{Introduction}
Affordable computing and flexible and inexpensive sensor technology are transforming the current practice and methods for traffic data collection, monitoring and analysis: big data is changing how we interact with our environment and how we approach problem solving tasks in the field of transportation. This should come to no surprise as
urban mobility the complexity and pervasiveness in daily life
of urban mobility lends itself naturally to large amounts of data. In this context, the use of mobile and/or fixed video sensors for traffic monitoring and data collection is becoming a common practice not only for freeways but also for urban streets.
This Early and notable examples include the NGSIM project which included a dataset of extracted trajectories from video data of a 1~km stretch of freeway \cite{Kim_2005}. The availability of such large data sets opens up possibilities for more dynamic traffic load balancing and congestion easing of road networks and in return provides researchers with participatory network usage data collection. This new situation in which traffic data is being collected intensively demands more intelligent and advanced methods for traffic data analysis; it is then not surprising that computer vision techniques have gained popularity given the potential of transforming the existing CCTV
surveillance monitoring infrastructure into a highly detailed traffic data collection tool to identify and study traffic behaviours.
One such behavioural study application is in proactive road safety diagnosis. This has been a long-standing goal in the field of transportation safety. Traditional statistical methods applied to accident data require long observation periods (years of crash data): one must wait for (enough) accidents to
occur. occur in this time. Beginning in the 1960s, attempts were made to predict collision rates based on observations without a collision rather than historical accident records \cite{Perkins_1968}: these methods are now termed surrogate safety methods. The
traffic conflict technique Traffic Conflict Technique (TCT) was one of the earliest methods proposed which entailed the observation of quasi-collision events: situations in which road users were exposed to some recognizable risk (probability) of collision, e.g. a {\textquotedblleft}near-miss{\textquotedblright}. However, several problems limited their adoption:
the manual data collection
method is costly and may not be reliable, and the definition and objective measurement of these events are difficult \cite{Chin_1997}.
Today, with technological improvements in computing power, data storage, sensor technologies, and advances in artificial intelligence, these issues are quickly being addressed. This research presents the application of a video-based automated trajectory analysis solution which combines the latest advances in high-resolution traffic data acquisition \cite{Saunier_2010} and machine learning methods to model and predict collision potential from relatively short, but extremely rich traffic data. This data is typically obtained from ordinary video data via computer vision from a camera situated at
10 m 5~metres or more above the roadway \cite{Jackson_2013}. This trajectory data consists of position and velocity measurements of road users captured 15 to 30 times per second to a relatively high degree of accuracy. This amounts to several million individual instantaneous measurements over the period of one day at a typical site.
This high-resolution data permits the measurement of precisely defined instantaneous surrogate safety measures identifying collision probability. One such measure is time-to-collision (TTC) which measures the time
remaining remaining, at any given instant
to some collision point in the future defined by a and for any potential collision course with another road
user. user or a stationary obstacle, before the collision occurs. This measure is useful as it provides
the remaining a minimum reaction time
road users have required for drivers to react to and avoid
a potential collisions. Higher TTCs are generally considered safer, though the precise link has yet to be
validated. However, validated in part because the potential for collision is poorly established and defined in the literature. In fact, this measure relies on motion prediction hypotheses to identify
potential collision courses. The traditional approach is to use constant velocity projection \cite{Amundsen_1977} \cite{Laureshyn_2010} (situations in which road users fail to correct their
course), course for some reason or another and are subject to Newton's first law of motion), which is the motion prediction method most frequently used,
often without
a further justification. This approach does not natively provide a collision course probability, and it
will is not be suitable in situations where observed trajectories do no include constant velocity displacements: for example, turning lanes in an intersection and movements in a roundabout.
More advanced collision course modelling efforts
are have being developed, including motion patterns which represent naturalistic (expected) driving behaviour learnt from
the same data set. all other road users of a particular scene with corresponding initial conditions. This
procedure probabilistic approach provides
several potential collision points and their probability as a
function continuum of
both the characteristics of the specific site and the behaviour of the road users. The motion patterns, or the distribution of trajectories at a site and their probabilities, potential collision points. Motion patterns may be described discretely over time and space \cite{St_Aubin_2014} or with prototype trajectories \cite{saunier07probabilistic}.
The Some disadvantages of motion
and collision predictions patterns are
that they are limited in time-horizon (maximum calculable TTC) and computationally intensive as they explore, for each pair of road users, at each point in time, all future positions in time and space
(typically subject to
a the time
horizon). horizon. Furthermore, interaction complexity and exposure
tend to increase exponentially as the number of simultaneous road users in a scene
increases. For example, over the course of one day, a typical intersection can experience between 100 thousands and 100 increases varying anywhere from hundreds to millions of
these instantaneous interactions, depending on the intersection complexity. interactions per hour.
This paper
presents presents, step-by-step, a complete automated system for proactive road safety analysis
that can deal with using large amounts of video data. To the authors' knowledge, the presented system is the most comprehensive to be applied to such
big a large amount of data collected in the field for a real world traffic engineering study. A large video
data set was
dataset collected at more than
20 roundabouts 40 roundabout weaving zones in Queb{\'{e}}c
across 20 different roundabouts to study road user behaviour and
their safety. Camera views record data at more than 40 roundabout corresponding safety using surrogate safety analysis. Roundabout weaving
zones, an zones are defined as the area within the roundabout delimited by an
entry approach and the next following exit. Each camera
records recorded 12 to 16
h hours of video on a
given typical work day,
which constitutes constituting a dataset of over
600 470 hours of video data. Applying the proposed method to this large dataset
yields yielded considerable amounts of indicators, from individual road user measurements,
e.g.\ e.g. speed, to individual interaction measurements,
e.g.\ e.g. TTC, to aggregated indicators per road user or interaction, to aggregated indicators per site over time and space.
Analysing such big data is a challenge of a magnitude that has never been undertaken before in driver behaviour and road safety research. It holds the key to understanding the processes that lead road users to collide, and to design and validate safety indicators that do not require accidents to occur. The approach will be demonstrated on this video dataset to identify roundabout characteristics that influence road safety. The paper is organized as follows: the next section presents the
step-by-step methodology, with practical examples drawn from the roundabout dataset,
which is then applied to about half of the collected followed by video data
calibration results, safety indicator aggregation and
various system outputs are presented, before the conclusion prediction comparisons, and
discussion initial results of
future work. the complete roundabout study.