IoT System for Real-Time Near-Crash Detection for Automated Vehicle Testing

Our world is moving towards the goal of fully autonomous driving at a fast pace. While the latest automated vehicles (AVs) can handle most real-world scenarios they encounter, a major bottleneck for turning fully autonomous driving into reality is the lack of sufficient corner case data for training and testing AVs. Near-crash data, as a widely used surrogate data for traffic safety research, can also serve the purpose of AV testing if properly collected. To this end, this paper proposes an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system for real-time near-crash data collection. The system has several cool features. First, it is a low-cost and standalone system that is backward-compatible with any existing vehicles. People can fix the system to their dashboards for near-crash data collection and collision warning without the approval or help of vehicle manufacturers. Second, we propose a new near-crash detection method that models the target's size changes and relative motions with the bounding boxes generated by deep-learning-based object detection and tracking. This near-crash detection method is fast, accurate, and reliable; particularly, it is insensitive to camera parameters, thereby having an excellent transferability to different dashboard cameras. We have conducted comprehensive experiments with 100 videos locally processed at Jetson, as well as real-world tests on cars and buses. Besides collecting corner cases, it can also serve as a white-box platform for testing innovative algorithms and evaluating other AV products. The system contributes to the real-world testing of AVs and has great potential to be brought into large-scale deployment.