Measurements of damaged vehicles for description and classification of collision types and accident severity is important in the field of vehicle safety. The measurements are used in both descriptive as well as analytical research. It is essential that the measurements are of adequate quality both in terms of the quality of measurements taken on each vehicle as well as the single value. It is however often impossible to get such data in a large scale data collection as the measurements must be conducted by only partly trained data collectors. Further more, it is normally impossible to get back to the damaged vehicle afterwards to add other measurements. In this paper a technique is described using arbitrarily taken photographs of damaged vehicles involved in road traffic accidents. By using modern picture evaluation of adequate quality it is possible to use fairly simple techniques based on personal computers. The damage to one car is analyzed together with manually taken measurements to assess the quality and time spent for the analysis. For the covering abstract of the conference, see IRRD 837684.
Abstract