Unsigned Road Incidents Detection Using Improved RESNET From Driver-View Images

Frequent road incidents cause significant physical harm and economic losses globally. The key to ensuring road safety lies in accurately perceiving surrounding road incidents. However, the highly dynamic nature of traffic introduces significant challenges, particularly in detecting sudden and temporary incidents. In this article, we propose a novel detection framework, multihead attention ResNet with dynamic bottleneck (DB_RESNET_MHA), to identify physical unsigned road incidents. Our approach introduces three key innovations. First, we develop a tailored data augmentation strategy to create images that closely mimic the complex variations found in real-world road environments. Second, we enhance model expressiveness by employing attention mechanisms to nonlinearly integrate convolutional kernels within the residual network. Furthermore, we refine the prediction head by applying spatially distinct attention weights, enabling the model to capture intricate correlations between different features more effectively. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we create a dataset for unsigned road incidents (UnsignRI), comprising a total of 16 323 images that capture 12 distinct types of incidents. It stands out as the most comprehensive dataset in the field, encompassing a wide range of geographical features and incident categories. Experimental results show that DB_RESNET_MHA achieves an average accuracy of 96.2% and a f1-score of 0.955 across various categories of unsigned incidents, surpassing other models.