Citation

Horak D. Collision 2009; 4(2): 18-25.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Collision Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Vehicle-mounted video cameras increasingly are being used on buses, trucks, taxis, trains and passenger cars. These cameras can be used to reinforce safe driving by allowing supervisors to view unsafe driving behavior. They can also be useful in accident reconstruction. This paper describes a method developed by the National Transportation Safety Board for estimating speed and trajectory of vehicles involved in accidents based on videos from vehicle-mounted cameras. The method is based on aligning landmark locations in synthesized video frames generated with a model of the camera optics and a survey of the accident site with landmark locations in video frames acquired by the camera. The method yields accurate speed and trajectory estimates, and has been used successfully in highway and rail accident investigations. A technique has also been developed for deriving survey data needed for the speed and trajectory estimation method without performing a conventional survey of the accident scene.