Publication

Video and time series data collected through Video Event Recorder (VER) equipment installed in vehicles have been identified as a valuable source for insights into the causation of crashes. Previous collaborations with a commercial company providing behaviour-based-safety services allowed the participants to have access to VER video and time series data. In this context, the vision of this project was to enable access to VER data and produce a deeper understanding of the factors leading to crashes as a basis for the development of safety measures and driver models.

The project started with the objective to set up an agreement between the Swedish and external partners (including the US based VTTI and University of Iowa) about how to organize a long-term relationship with the provider of VER video and time series data. Such an agreement would have ensured the provision of crash and near-crash data continuously for the partners for many years. Unfortunately, the agreement was not reached and the data provider withdrew from the project in December 2016.

Given the unexpected situation, we looked for alternative analysis solutions and shifted the project focus to method development and analysis of existing data. The new direction in the project produced the following results:

• Definition of process and methodology for annotating VER videos: the main output of this activity was the issue of a codebook with the list, and a corresponding description, of the variables which can be extracted from (VER) video and time series.

• Inter-rater reliability analysis of annotations obtained from naturalistic driving data (NDD): the main output of this activity was the assessment of the inter-rater reliability of NDD video coding performed by different annotators. A study was conducted with 12 students who annotated from 40 videos a set of variables extracted by the codebook developed in the previous activity.

• Glance behaviors and crash causation analysis for intersection crashes: the main output of this activity was the quantitative analysis of drivers’ glance behaviors as well as the qualitative causation analysis of crashes occurred in the left turn across path / opposite direction (LTAP/OD) conflict scenario.