TRAFFIC ACCIDENT DETECTION THROUGH A HYDRODYNAMIC LENS

In this paper we present a novel method for automatic traffic accident detection, based on Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics (SPH). In our method, a motion flow field is obtained from the video through dense optical flow extraction. Then a thermal diffusion process (TDP) is exploited to turn the motion flow field into a coherent motion field. Approximating the moving particles to individuals, their interaction forces, represented as endothermic reactions, are computed using the enthalpy measure, thus obtaining the potential particles of interest. Furthermore, we exploit SPH that accumulates the contribution of each particle in a weighted form, based on a kernel function. The experimental evaluation is conducted on a set of video sequences collected from Youtube, and the obtained results are compared against a state of the art technique.