Automatic incident detection has become a necessity for the ever-increasing traffic density on most major roads. Effective incident management completely depends on fast incident detection and fast incident verification. While video detection handles both traffic data collection and automatic incident detection, its incident detection shows a high detection rate, a short time to detect, a fast incident verification and a low false alarm rate. These characteristics make video extremely useful for reaching incident management goals such as fast and effective intervention or secondary incident prevention. This article contains a review of some of the classical incident detection systems based on loops and the new possibilities created by wide area video detection. Wide area video incident detection proves to be the best and most reliable detection system currently available. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114174.
Abstract