Abstract
Recently, traffic accidents have been increasing on the Hanshin expressway and the number of the accidents already exceeds 6, 500 in a year. Once an accident occurs on the expressway, it is likely to lead to the temporary closing of lanes and a potentially serious disaster by the following vehicles.
If accidental events, such as accidents or stopped vehicles, could be detected promptly, the alarm of the events to the following vehicles and to the traffic control center would become faster than it was. Feasibility studies and their experiments have been conducted, whether the events can be detected by processing images taken from video cameras. The prototype system was installed at a curved area on the expressway where the events frequently occur. The study of the detection algolithms and the verification of the effects after the prototype system installation will be reported in this paper.
