Multiclass Vehicles

Transportation Research Part C 119 (2020) 102744
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Transportation Research Part C

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trc
Conflict analytics through the vehicle safety space in mixed traffic

flows using UAV image sequences
Albert Y. Chen *, Yen-Lin Chiu, Meng-Hsiu Hsieh, Po-Wei Lin, Ohay Angah
Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, No.1, Section 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Keywords: The mixed traffic flow has complex dynamics by nature. The kinematic differences between
Traffic conflict automobiles and motorcycles result to distinct driving behaviors. Traditional automobile-based
Computer vision traffic flow theory is not always suitable for mixed traffic streams. The purpose of this study is
Safety space
to observe from actual data a clearance boundary, called Safety Space, drivers maintain from
Object based tracking
Mixed traffic flow
other vehicles, and use it as a spatial filter to determine conflicts in mixed traffic flows. Image
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data are collected from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and microscopic characteristics such
as vehicle type, position, velocity, and trajectory are extracted through computer vision tech
niques. The Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature and the Support Vector Machine
(SVM) classifier are utilized for the vehicle detection, while the Kalman Filter is employed for the
derivation of vehicle trajectories. The Safety Space is then determined based on those trajectories.
Validation data are collected at intersections in Taipei, Taiwan; Bangkok, Thailand; and Mumbai,
India. The vehicle detection and tracking are satisfactory, and the Safety Space surrogate reveals
risk zones caused by spatial proximity between vehicles.
1. Introduction
The composition of the traffic flow differs from region to region in the world, resulting to distinctive characteristics. Traffic streams
composed of vehicle types with a wide variety of static and dynamic characteristics are very different from that with homogeneous
vehicle types (Mayakuntla and Verma, 2016). The mixed traffic flow has an impact on traffic safety because of complicated in
teractions among various types of vehicles. The kinematic differences between automobiles and motorcycles result to distinctive
driving behaviors.
The motorcycle is a common mode of transport. Compared to other modes, motorcycles are characterized by their low cost, high
mobility, and ease for parking. In addition, motorcycles have a relatively high effectiveness in short trips. These reasons result to higher
ownership rates of motorcycles over automobiles in specific regions of the world. Unfortunately, motorcyclists suffer from severe
injuries, sometimes fatal, when traffic accidents occur. Without physical protection from the vehicle, motorcyclists are particularly
vulnerable to collisions.
Most research efforts in automobile traffic flow are in the context where vehicles follow lane markings. However, motorcycles have
very different driving behaviors, and the traditional automobile-based traffic flow theory might not be suitable to mixed traffic streams
composed of automobiles, motorcycles, and other types of vehicles.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: albertchen@ntu.edu.tw (A.Y. Chen), r03521502@ntu.edu.tw (Y.-L. Chiu), r02521527@ntu.edu.tw (M.-H. Hsieh), r05521501@
ntu.edu.tw (P.-W. Lin), r01521306@ntu.edu.tw (O. Angah).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2020.102744
Received 16 May 2020; Received in revised form 14 July 2020; Accepted 2 August 2020
Available online 21 August 2020
0968-090X/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A.Y. Chen et al. Transportation Research Part C 119 (2020) 102744
To study the complicated interactions and behavior of motorcycle movements, detailed data is required. Road side infrastructures
such as cameras for image sequences (Zhang and Jin, 2019; Fu et al., 2019) and point clouds generated from LiDAR (Zhao et al., 2019;
Jung et al., 2018) have been utilized for analytics of the traffic flow and entity interactions. Zhao et al. (2019) used a High-Angle
Spatial–Temporal Diagram Analysis (HASDA) method for vehicle trajectory extraction in high angle videos. Fu et al. (2019)
analyzed data collected from vision-based trajectories for vehicles in non-signalized intersections and discovered secondary
pedestrian-vehicle interactions are more dangerous than primary interactions. Zhao et al. (2019) analyzed traffic trajectories based on
roadside LiDAR, and discovered a new area of application for LiDAR sensors, while Jung et al. (2018) developed a framework to utilize
3D laser scanning data to evaluate sight distances for drivers of different vehicle types. The relative motion of cyclist in following and
overtaking interactions could also be characterized with automation (Mohammed et al., 2019). In phantom traffic jams, fuel rates were
studied via vehicle trajectories (Wu et al., 2019). With automatically extracted vehicle trajectory data, proactive safety analytics are
enabled (Xie et al., 2019).
Provided with the actual vehicle traveling details in the mixed traffic flow, how to assess the potential risks is of importance.
Although many evaluation methods for traffic conflicts were studied, the measurements were established in the context of automobile-
based traffic conditions and there are considerably less studies on motorcycles and mixed traffic flows.
The main purpose of this study is to analyze conflicts in mixed traffic flows. The proposed approach is through automatic extraction
of traffic data from videos collected from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The target traffic condition being investigated is mixed
traffic streams of automobiles and motorcycles. Through observation of the microscopic characteristics of mixed traffic streams, traffic
conflicts of motorcycles and automobiles could potentially be revealed in more detail. The comfort zone in proximity of the vehicle is
determined as the Safety Space, and we propose to utilize this Safety Space as a spatial filter for the identification of traffic conflicts. In
other words, conflicts happen when the Safety Space is invaded by other vehicles.
2. Literature review
Traditional evaluation methods of roadway safety are mainly based on the accident statistics. Because traffic accidents are un
predictable and rare events (Oh et al., 2010), safety is difficult to assess based on changes in the aggregated number of traffic accidents.
Lu et al. (2011) proposed a nonlinear model to describe the relationship between road traffic accidents and conflicts through
driving recorders, which enabled possible estimation of the accidents and evaluation of the safety level through encountered conflicts.
Serious traffic conflicts result in collisions, and the more severe of a conflict, the more possible an accident will occur.
The evaluation methods based on Traffic Conflict Techniques (TCTs) have received attentions in the domain of traffic safety
(Perkins and Harris, 1967; Perkins, 1969). TCTs were first introduced by the General Motors Corporation (Perkins and Harris, 1967),
and the main applications were traffic safety assessments at intersections and road segments. The conflict severity was evaluated by the
number of traffic conflicts or the proportion of traffic conflicts. According to the General Motors Corporation, a conflict occurs when
the driver hits the brake or swerve to avoid a possible collision in the near future.
The measurements of conflict become complicated under the mixed traffic flow because the braking behavior does not necessarily
represent vehicles encountering a conflict. For motorcycles, because of their high mobility and frequent swerving behaviors, the
number of conflicts could be overestimated. In contrast, the conflict severity is underestimated if we evaluate conflicts by considering
only the brake lights. Risks could be contributed from other factors such as spatial proximity to other vehicles.
Many research efforts for traffic conflict assessment have been proposed. Lu et al. (2011) established a method to quantify the
traffic conflict severity by analyzing the Time-To-Collision (TTC) and non-complete braking time. The TTC has also been used in
conflict-based safety performance functions for signalized intersections (Essa and Sayed, 2018), and channelized right-turn lanes
(Autey et al., 2012). Wu and Jovanis (2012) investigated driving data regarding crashes and crash-surrogate events. Wang and Sta
matiadis (2014) proposed the Aggregate Conflict Propensity Metric (ACPM) based on a simulation surrogate, and discussed its
comparison with the TTC. The Extended Delta-V index, taking into account the severity of the injuries, was also implemented for
conflict analytics (Laureshyn et al., 2017).
The Post-Encroachment Time (PET) is another commonly used conflict surrogate (Zheng et al., 2018a; Zheng et al., 2019; Zheng
et al., 2014; Zheng and Ismail, 2017; Peesapati et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2018). Peesapati et al. (2013) evaluated the effectiveness of the
PET for the tendency of crashes between left-turning vehicles and opposing vehicles at signalized intersections. Wang et al. (2018) used
traffic simulation for the evaluation of traffic safety using the PET and TTC.
Vehicle trajectories are very useful data for the analytics of traffic such as studying of driving behavior (Lin et al., 2016). Zaki and
Sayed (2013) proposed a framework for automated road-user classification using movement trajectories, while image based methods
for safety have been proposed through vehicle trajectories for crash predictions (Wang et al., 2019), and conflicts at transportation
engineering facilities such as the left-turn bay (Zheng et al., 2018b).
Coifman et al. (1998) proposed using computer vision for vehicle tracking and traffic surveillance, while Sayed et al. (2013) utilized
computer vision for the diagnostics of road safety issues. Simulated and field-measured conflicts were also studied for safety assess
ments of signalized intersections in Australia (Guo et al., 2019). With computer vision, large-scale data collection, processing, and
traffic safety analytics have been enabled (St-Aubin et al., 2015).
A comprehensive review was conducted on trajectory based traffic flow studies (Li et al., 2020), and UAV based high quality
imagery was suggested to extract trajectory data with better resolution in time and space, in comparison to the NGSIM dataset, which
has become the de facto empirical microscopic traffic data set (Li et al., 2020; Coifman and Li, 2017). The study also suggested studies
on collision prevention through simulations build based on empirical trajectory data (Li et al., 2020).
For the study of mixed traffic conflicts of different vehicle types, methodologies applied to pedestrian and vehicle conflicts could be
2
Fig. 1. Image Data Analytics Process for the Mixed Traffic Flow.
Fig. 2. Detector Model Training: SVM Classifier with the HOG Feature for Automobiles and Motorcycles.
adapted (Chen et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2019; Ismail et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2012). As a pioneer study on trajectory extraction and
pedestrian and vehicle conflicts, Ismail et al. (2009) utilized the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker for the automatic pro
cessing of image data and conflict analysis through surrogate values of TTC, Gap Time (a variation on PET), and Deceleration-to-Safety
Time (DST). Chen et al. (2017) adapted an object tracking based methodology for the tracking of vehicles and pedestrians, and
analyzed the inter-modal conflict, and later calibrated a simulation model from the data collected (Chen et al., 2019). Zhang et al.
(2012) extracted the traffic object locations from video data, and conducted a study of microlevel pedestrian-involved collisions. They
defined the time difference to collision (TDTC) parameter as a variation from TTC and PET.
Although there are many very computational intensive classifiers based on the deep neural network such as the Mask R-CNN (He
et al., 2017), and the tracking through SORT (Bewley et al., 2016) that applied the Kalman Filter (Bishop and Welch, 2001), and even
the combination of the two forming the Detect-And-Track model (Girdhar et al., 2018), finding an appropriate model for any problem
in hand is important.
For the many assessments and evaluation methodologies of traffic conflicts, the measurements were established in the context of
car-based traffic conditions and there are considerably few studies on motorcycle-based traffic flow and mixed traffic flow. To capture
the risks associated to spatial proximity, the Safety Space concept has its potential to be adapted.
Nguyen et al. (2014) developed a simulation model to measure traffic conflicts. In their work, they calculate the Deceleration Rates
(DR) at each time step of the simulation model, and factorized based on density of motorcycle flow. The concept of Safety Space was
introduced as an approximated half ellipse in front of a motorcycle and a constant clearance on both sides (Nguyen, 2012; Nguyen and
Hanaoka, 2013). In their work, the Safety Space was formed to model motorcycles’ behavior of non-lane-based movements.
Hou et al. (2014) also presented an analogous concept named buffer area, which is an area the vehicle occupies that encompasses
not only its physical size and the space slightly larger. The motivation for the buffer area derives from the observation that drivers keep
a certain safety distance from other vehicles. In their work, the buffer idea is to assist in the calculation of the TTC.
This study proposes the utilization of the Safety Space as a spatial filter for the identification of conflicts in mixed traffic flows. The
Safety Space potentially is able to capture conflicts caused by non-lane-based movements of the motorcycles. Videos in top-view under
the mixed traffic flow condition are recorded by the UAV, and a computer vision based system for automatic vehicle detection,
tracking, and traffic conflict analysis is developed. The boundary of the Safety Space is formed with observed data, and risk areas of
traffic at signalized intersections are revealed based on data collected in Taiwan, Thailand, and India.
3. Methodology
To investigate whether the Safety Space could serve as a conflict surrogate for the mixed traffic flow composed of automobiles and
motorcycles, image data are to be collected. Because the Safety Space of an automobile and a motorcycle should be different in
dimension, the object based tracking should be conducted to derive trajectories for each of these vehicle types. An introduction to
tracking methodologies in image sensing is given in Appendix A.
3
Fig. 3. Safety space boundary determined by clearance from 99% of other vehicles.
In the following, we introduce the vehicle detection and tracking process, and describe the proposed Safety Space. The process of
the data analytics is shown in Fig. 1.
3.1. Vehicle detection and tracking
In this work we have chosen the Support Vector Machines (SVM) with a linear kernel as the classifier, because it is a sparse kernel
machine with good efficiency and accuracy. The SVM is a binary classifier, and we trained separate SVMs for each of the vehicle types:
automobiles and motorcycles. The model training process is shown in Fig. 2.
The SVM is a supervised machine learning classifier, formed into a Quadratic Program (QP) with constraints enforcing its soft
decision boundary. Due to its convexity, the SVM reaches optimality through closed form analytical procedures given fixed penalty
parameters for mis-classifications. Training (optimization) of the SVM requires training data to be labeled – having the correct answer
to the classification problem available.
To provide the SVM with a better chance of success for classification, images are mapped to a feature space called the Histogram of
Oriented Gradients (HOG) (Wang et al., 2009). The HOG is selected because it is a commonly used feature space for pedestrian
detection, and motorcycles in top-view have the boundary (outline) similar to pedestrians. The HOG in practice converts images from a
lower dimensional space to higher dimensions. In the case for pedestrian detection, images of 64 × 128 are projected to a space of 3,
780 dimensions. As a result, images are converted to the HOG feature vector first, for both training and testing.
HOG of automobiles (positive samples) and other images (negative samples) are prepared for training of the SVM for the auto
mobiles. Similarly, positive and negative samples are prepared to train the SVM for the motorcycles.
When detecting vehicles, image segmentation through the Adaptive Gaussian Mixture model is utilized for isolation of the Region
of Interests (ROIs), the foreground image, in each frame of the video. A sliding window approach is then applied on the identified ROIs
for classification (using the SVM) to decide whether the ROI has vehicles or not.
Because images are taken from an UAV in top-view, the size of automobiles and motorcycles are fixed with mild variations, and the
detection window with a fixed size is sufficient. This reduces the computational time and eliminates false detections.
In the tracking phase, the detections in consecutive frames need to be associated. In other words, the same vehicle in frame at time t
and at time t +1 has to be associated to achieve tracking. We apply the Kalman Filter (Welch and Bishop, 1995) for this linkage between
neighboring frames. The Kalman Filter predicts the location of a vehicle in the subsequent frame (at t + 1) according to the vehicle’s
current (at t) kinematic information. The predicted location at t +1 and the closest detection (at t + 1) are then matched as the same
object.
After the tracking phase, we have trajectories of automobiles and motorcycles. The trajectories include information such as the
collection of location, in x and y coordinates, of a particular vehicle in the duration say from frame t to frame t + d. Through these
spatio-temporal pieces of information, vehicle kinematic information, aggregated traffic information, and interactive relationships
among vehicles could be derived.
3.2. Safety space
The concept of the Safety Space (Nguyen, 2012) is applied to represent risk perception of motorcyclists. The Safety Space is a buffer
zone that surrounds the vehicle with a shape of an approximated half ellipse in front and a rectangular area on the sides. The boundary
of the space is determined by the influence of surrounding vehicles on the subject vehicle.
The Safety Space can be referred to as the minimal clearance space that a driver considers acceptable or comfortable when driving
in order to avoid possible collisions. As a result, this study proposes the utilization of the Safety Space as a spatial filter for the
identification of conflicts in mixed traffic flows.
The following is the nomenclature for the Safety Space (Nguyen, 2012). For a subject motorcycle α, the length of the semi-major
axis of the ellipse is τM νMα , where τM indicates the reaction time and νMα indicates the velocity. In other words, this length is the TTC if
τM is set as TTCth . The length of the semi-minor axis is expressed as WM + 0.5dMy + 0.5dOy , where WM is the lateral distance between a
motorcycle and other vehicles in the y direction. The dMx , dMy indicate the physical size of a motorcycle along the x and y directions,
4
Table 1
Intersection Characteristics of Taipei Tests.
Location Taipei, Taiwan Bangkok, Thailand Mumbai, India
Intersection Xinhai-Roosevelt Roosevelt-Shinsheng S. Sala BKC

Scenario Usual Accident-prone Accident-prone Accident-prone
Observed Duration 30 m 30 m 15 m 15 m
Effective Duration 12 m 12 m 5.75 m 6m
Automobiles 485 574 199 178
Motorcycles 608 1,194 326 134
Tuk-tuks 0 0 0 247
respectively. The values dOx , dOy indicate the physical size of the other vehicle along the x and y directions, respectively.
The Safety Space of an automobile α has a different shape from that of a motorcycle. It is approximately a rectangular shape consists
of a rectangle in the middle-front and a quarter of the ellipse in both sides of the vehicle. The safety distance of the semi-major axis is
τC νCα , where τC denotes the average reaction time of automobiles and νCα denotes the velocity. The length of the semi-minor axis is
expressed as WC + 0.5dCy + 0.5dOy , where WC is the lateral clearance when an automobile travels with other vehicles side by side. The
values dCx , dCy indicate the physical size of the automobile along the x and y directions, respectively.
In this work, we propose to determine WM and WC based on observed field data. The minimum acceptable lateral clearance from
99% of other observed vehicles, as shown in Fig. 3, are adapted. The left figure shows the heatmap representation of vehicle occur
rences, introduced later in Section 4.4. The right figure represents the occurrence distribution along the y axis at position x = 0 of the
heatmap.
4. Results
This section presents results analyzed from actual data collected from an UAV. Information provided include (1) description of data
collected; (2) vehicle detection results; (3) some extracted traffic flow characteristics; (4) the Safety Space from data; and (5) traffic
conflict analysis.
The UAV being utilized was a DJI Phantom 3 Professional with 12.4 M effective pixels. Video clips were captured at a vertical angle
(top-view) with respect to the ground. Compared with lower camera angles, this setup not only has a wider observation region, but also
significantly reduces possible occlusions among vehicles. In top-view, the appearance of vehicles is comparatively simple and vehicle
sizes are fixed, which saves computation for object detection because the sliding window has a fixed size. In addition, errors caused by
coordinate transformation can also be reduced. A study on the precision can be found in Appendix B.
4.1. Data description
We have collected data from three locations, Taipei, Taiwan; Bangkok, Thailand; and Mumbai, India to show the applicability of the
proposed approach in different countries. Results from four intersections are presented for the formation of the Safety Space and
analysis of traffic conflicts. The intersections include: a usual intersection and three accident-prone intersections. Table 1 depicts the
details.
4.2. Detection results
To evaluate the performance of vehicle detections, the following measurements are used. Ground truth (GT) is the true answers
counted manually; true positive (TP) is the number of vehicles that are detected correctly; false positive (FP) or Type I error is the
number of non-vehicle objects that are detected as vehicles; and false negative (FN) or Type II error is the number of vehicles that are
missed. Precision (P) and Recall (R) are common evaluation measures to assess the detection performance.
P is the fraction of the correct detections among all positive detections. In other words, it denotes the success ratio of the detections.
P is stated as:
TP
P= (1)
TP + FP
This indicator is also called Positive Predictive Values (PPV) in some literatures.
On the other hand, R is the fraction of correct detections among true objects. In other words, it indicates the ratio of the result
integrity. R is calculated by:
TP TP
R= = (2)
TP + FN GT
The sum of TP and FN forms the number of objects which is the ground truth, GT. The value of R reveals the number of detections that
were correctly predicted among GT. This indicator is also called sensitivity in some literatures.
Implementation and customizations were carried out using the C++ programming language and the OpenCV library (Intel, 2010).
5
Table 2
Experimental Results of Vehicle Tracking.
Intersection Xinhai-Roosevelt RooseveltShinsheng S. Sala BKC
Vehicle Type AMa MCb AM MC AM MC AM MC Tukc
GT 485 608 574 1,194 506 329 178 134 247

TP 472 595 554 1,161 456 314 169 126 242
FP 9 10 1 9 30 18 1 9 15
FN 13 13 20 33 49 15 9 8 5
P 98.13% 98.35% 99.82% 99.23% 93.82% 94.58% 99.41% 93.33% 94.16%
R 97.32% 97.86% 96.52% 97.24% 90.29% 95.44% 94.94% 94.03% 97.98%
a
AM: Automobile.
b
MC: Motorcycle.
c
Tuk: Tuk-Tuk.
Fig. 4. Illustration of Vehicle Tracking in the Mixed Traffic Flow.
All training samples were manually cropped from videos recorded at the intersection of Xinhai-Roosevelt, and with a fixed size of
128 × 64 pixels. For Mumbai, an additional class for Tuk-tuks was trained based on data collected in India.
When training supervised classification models, positive and negative samples are needed. Positive samples are data which include
the target object, such as an automobile. Negative samples are data without the target object. We have two separate HOG-based SVM
classifiers for the automobile and motorcycle. The automobile classifier was trained with 3,750 positive samples and 342 negative
samples (Joachims, 2008), and the motorcycle classifier used 2,136 positive samples and 7,034 negative samples. These proportions of
samples were adjusted according to detector performance. The greater proportion of positive samples the higher TP and FP rates, while
the increase of negative samples causes a higher FN rate while reducing the FP rate.
Vehicle trajectories are obtained from the recorded videos to form the Safety Space and also conduct the conflict analysis. The
following rules were used for the elimination of noise when constructing the trajectories using the Kalman filter. The trajectory length
of individual detection should be greater than the given threshold Tvalid . The number of frames that the vehicle is detected during
tracking should be greater than the threshold N. The driving direction should be along the lane-direction because we do not plan to
detect vehicles driving in the opposite lanes. According to manual inspection, if the trajectory of an individual vehicle is classified into
the wrong vehicle type, segmented into two parts, or multiple-detections (more than one trajectory for the same vehicle), these cases
all belong to false detections. The tracking results applied on each case are shown in Table 2, and illustrated in Fig. 4.
Major detection errors result from the exterior color of vehicles. Due to the background subtraction, regions of vehicles having color
close to the pavement were severely eroded or even broken into pieces, causing incomplete foreground areas and unexpected ROIs.
However, lowering the threshold value for background subtraction can solve this and decrease the number of FN while increasing the
FP. Although there were some occasional missed detections (FNs), as shown in the center of Fig. 4 where a dark colored automobile is
not detected, these FNs happen not very often, and the Kalman filter is able to accommodate these as long as the vehicle is detected
prior to this FN and in later frames.
4.3. General traffic flow characteristics extraction
Once trajectories of vehicles are obtained, we can treat them as spatio-temporal logs with micro level information. For example,
6
Fig. 5. Lane Distribution of Vehicle Count at the Xinhai-Rosevelt Intersection.
Fig. 6. Lane Distribution of Vehicle Speed at the Xinhai-Rosevelt Intersection.
aggregated traffic characteristics could be derived, such as the following results. Fig. 5 shows the distribution of vehicle counts for the
Xinhai-Rosevelt intersection, by lateral position, where the lane markings are specified by the dash-lines. Fig. 6 depicts the traffic speed
distribution for the same intersection. Depending on the application in interest, information could be processed to show more details of
the traffic flow.
4.4. Safety space from data
For the Safety Space analysis, we first show how heatmaps are generated. Then results of Safety Space from data are presented, and
comparison of Safety Space contributing from different vehicle sources are revealed.
4.4.1. Data in the heatmap representation

By centering a vehicle at the origin of the x and y coordinates, relative positions of other vehicles can be recorded based on this
reference coordinates. As a result, a position heatmap for a single vehicle is derived with the occurrences of all other vehicles recorded.
We then superimpose heatmaps of a particular type of the centering vehicle (motorcycle or automobile) together, and the accumulated
position heatmap is derived for the particular vehicle type. A study on the video length required for the heatmap generation can be
found in Appendix C.
The heatmaps are generated in raster format with grid size of 0.1 × 0.1 m2 ; the positions of vehicles within the 0.1 × 0.1 m2 cell are
aggregated. The origin in the coordinate system is the centroid position of the vehicles and the travel direction is rightward (along the
positive x-axis). The negative y-axis direction represents the right side of vehicles and the positive y-axis direction represents the left
side. Different colors represent different levels of frequency (amount of accumulation): red depicts areas where vehicles, other than the
centered one, in proximity appear most frequently, while blue shows the areas with sparse vehicle occurrences. Heatmaps can be seen
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Fig. 7. Heatmaps of Relative Position: Motorcycles.
Fig. 8. Heatmaps of Relative Position: Automobiles.
in Figs. 7 and 8.
4.4.2. Heatmaps from data

Figs. 7 and 8 show the heatmaps when we center only motorcycles and automobiles, respectively. The region with dark blue in the
middle, origin of plane, represents the area with zero frequency. This can be considered as the spatial clearance vehicles keep from
other vehicles. Additionally, the shape is closer to an ellipse rather than a half-ellipse.
In Fig. 8, the area with dark blue is larger compared to that in Fig. 7, which is normal because automobiles have larger bodies. From
the ribbon areas with red and yellow in the top and bottom regions, travelings of surrounding vehicles parallel to the side of auto
mobiles is observed.
4.4.3. Safety space adjustments from observed data

The heatmaps present similar contours as the Safety Space defined by Nguyen (2012). Shown in Fig. 9, the black curves, based on
the definition of Nguyen (2012), are superimposed on the heatmaps. The parameters used in Fig. 9 are listed in Table 3. Values νMα and
νCα are substituted by the average speed of motorcycles and automobiles measured from the field, and other parameters are based on
8
Fig. 9. Comparison between Heatmaps and Safety Space (Xinhai-Roosevelt).
Nguyen (2012).
As shown in Fig. 9, the shape modes of the Safety Space and the region in dark blue are almost identical. However, the boundary of
the Safety Space (black curve) is smaller for the automobile case in Fig. 9(b) than the dark blue area of the heatmap in the middle, while
the motorcycles in Fig. 9(a) have much larger Safety Space boundary (black curve). This could be caused by the different data sources:
Nguyen et al. (2014) observed data collected from Vietnam. Different traffic conditions, such as traffic flow, the width of lanes and
driving customs, may cause distinct results.
To allow the concept of Safety Space to be applied in the conflict analysis, the values of WM and WC are modified. The WM is
calibrated by the field data for motorcycles based on the minimum acceptable lateral clearance of 99% to other vehicles. Likewise, the
WC is calibrated for automobiles. The resulting values for WM and WC are 0.45 m and 1.40 m.
Interestingly, parameters presented by Nguyen et al. (2014) are quite different from that learned in this study. Nguyen et al. (2014)
reported having WM > WC as shown in Table 3. Perhaps this resulted from the traffic flow in Taipei, Bangkok and Mumbai being very
different from that in Ho Chi Minh City where Nguyen et al. (2014) collected their data to calibrate their simulation model.
We further investigate whether the Safety Space changes with the vehicle speed. Data are first grouped into different speed ranges,
and then heatmaps are generated for each range. Results are shown in Fig. 10. The boundaries of Safety Space (black curves) are drawn
based on definitions in Nguyen et al. (2014), but with adjusted values for WM and WC aforementioned.
The dark blue region in the middle becomes larger along the x-direction as speed becomes larger. There are no significant changes
in the y-direction, which is also assumed in Nguyen et al. (2014) as a constant clearance. The same patterns are also observed for
automobiles in Fig. 11 where longitudinal spacing increase as the speed increases, while the lateral spacing is almost constant.
However, in low speed range, the clearance in the y-direction for vehicles seems to shrink slightly. This makes sense as drivers
potentially feel safer in the low speed range.
4.4.4. Interactions from different sources of vehicle types

To observe interactions from different sources of vehicle types, Figs. 12 and 13 reveal proximity accumulation from different types
of vehicles. Through the observed data, we have already learned that the Safety Spaces of motorcycles and automobiles are different.
However, because vehicles are traveling in the mixed traffic flow, the boundary of the Safety Space could potentially be contributed
more from a particular vehicle type.
By comparing the heatmaps accumulated from all vehicles and that only of a particular vehicle type, more insights in terms of the
spatial interactions can be observed. The heatmaps for motorcycles are shown in Fig. 12. In these two figures, the left figure is the result
contributed from both vehicle types (motorcycle and automobile), while the right figure is the heatmap when automobiles are ignored.
In proximity of the center of the heatmap, there is no significant difference, especially the dark blue regions in the middle. This suggests
that the motorcycle’s Safety Space is mainly contributed from interactions with motorcycles. However, there are more interactions in
areas further away from the center contributed from the automobiles. The clearance among motorcycles are in general narrower than
that of automobiles. In other words, automobiles play less important role in forming the boundary of Safety Space for motorcycles.
Similarly, heatmaps of the automobiles are shown in Fig. 13. The dark blue regions in the middle of the figures are in general
different. The contour of the heatmap in the left figure is more vague; while the dark blue areas have a clearer rectangular shape in the
right figure. Automobiles generally maintain wider clearances from each other. However, motorcycles affect the boundary of Safety
Space for automobiles, because motorcycles have a narrower threshold of WM = 0.45 m in comparison to that of the automobile WC =
1.40 m.
4.5. Traffic conflict analysis
In this study, we propose to utilize the Safety Space as a conflict surrogate. For comparison, we also show conflicts contributed from
the modified TTC. Details on the calculation of the modified TTC could be found in Appendix D. For simplicity, we define two types of
traffic conflicts: Type I Conflict for the modified TTC, and Type II Conflict for the adjusted Safety Space demonstrated in Section 4.5.
Conflicts are determined when (1) the modified TTC of a vehicle pair is less than 0.5 s, and (2) when the boundary of a vehicle’s Safety
Space is invaded by another vehicle.
The definition also explains why we use the 99% acceptable lateral spacing to fit the new boundary of Safety Space. However,
videos in our studies are screen to exclude those during waiting and discharge. In other words, the Safety Space as well as the conflicts
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A.Y. Chen et al.
Table 3
Parameters of Safety Space.
parameter value parameter value
τM the average reaction time of motorcycles (sec) 0.5 τC the average reaction time of cars (sec) 0.5
10
νMα velocity of the motorcycle (m/sec) 4.96 νC α velocity of the car (m/s) 6.15
WM the lateral distance on the y-axis between a motorcycle and other vehicles (m) 1.8 WC the lateral distance on the y-axis between a car and other vehicles (m) 1.0
dMx , dMy physical size of a motorcycle (m) 1.9, 0.8 dCx , dCy physical size of a car (m) 4.8, 1.6
Transportation Research Part C 119 (2020) 102744

Fig. 10. Heatmaps of Motorcycles with Different Speed (Xinhai-Roosevelt).
Fig. 11. Heatmaps of Automobiles with Different Speed (Xinhai-Roosevelt).
Fig. 12. Heatmaps of Relative Position for Motorcycles (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).
11
Fig. 13. Heatmaps of Relative Position for Automobiles (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).
Fig. 14. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Xinhai-Roosevelt).
12
Fig. 15. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).
are derived during the state of a more steady flow of traffic.

In the following, traffic conflicts are revealed in heatmap representation based on the Type I and Type II conflicts. For interested
readers, an explanation of how the heatmaps are generated based on the detected conflicts are given in Appendix E.
Traffic conflicts at the Xinhai-Roosevelt intersection are shown in Fig. 14. Fig. 14(a) depicts the distribution of the Type I Conflict,
Fig. 14(b) the distribution of Type II Conflict, and Fig. 14(c) the top-view of the intersection. Different colors represent different levels
of frequency.
The lower parts of the images show higher density of conflicts. From Fig. 5, we can see that in Taiwan usually there are less
motorcycles traveling in the inner lanes (top lanes in Fig. 14(c)). It can be seen that traffic conflicts occur more often in outer lanes.
For the Type I Conflict in Fig. 14(a), the occurred locations are mainly centralized in the right side of the cross-section, and also
locations before the turn. Those conflicts could result from the frequent acceleration and deceleration of the vehicles caused by right-
turning automobiles before reaching the intersection. In addition, the Type II Conflict in Fig. 14(b) has similar distribution as the Type I
Conflict. Vehicles in the outer lanes are prone to drive in relatively dense conditions, and in general do not maintain a proper lateral
and longitudinal clearance.
13
Fig. 16. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Sala Road).
Due to the special geometric characteristics of the Roosevelt-Shinsheng S. intersection as shown in Fig. 15, shifting of lane direction
and a lane reduction (road diet), the traffic condition is more complicated. For the Type I Conflict, conflicts are concentrated in the
bottom left region of Fig. 15(a). In Fig. 15(b), the Type II Conflict has an analogous distribution as the Type I Conflict.
It is speculated that those conflicts are caused by the traffic flow shifting to the right along the traveling direction, and the Type II
Conflict also captures the shrink in side clearance between vehicles traveling side-by-side.
Frequencies of the two types of conflicts at the intersection are relatively higher that of the Xinhai-Roosevelt intersection, consistent
with the accident statistics: this intersection is accident prone.
Fig. 16 shows the conflicts for the Sala intersection in Bangkok. Conflicts are mainly centralized in the region near the intersection.
Additionally, there is the left turn lane on top of the image, guided by the theoretical gore, where many conflicts occur. The many
conflicts on and near the gore reveal drivers not complying to the lane markings.
As for traffic conflicts in Mumbai, Fig. 17 shows the distribution of conflicts and the road geometry of the BKC intersection. Type I
Conflicts are concentrated in the left three lanes and especially in the area behind the waiting line as shown in Fig. 17(a). Those
conflicts may be caused by the lane-changes between through and left-turn vehicles. Some of the Type II Conflicts appeared before the
physical gore due to the left turn traffic as shown in Fig. 17(b).
14
Fig. 17. Traffic Conflict Distribution (BKC Intersection).
4.5.1. Conflict sources from different vehicle types

To investigate conflicts between vehicle types, 3 combinations of conflict sources are presented: conflicts between automobiles,
conflicts between motorcycles, and conflicts between a motorcycle and an automobile.
Fig. 18 shows the distribution of the Type I Conflict at the Roosevelt-Shinsheng S. intersection. In Figs. 18(b) and 18(c), conflicts
between two motorcycles and conflicts between a motorcycle and an automobile are shown. On the other hand, there is almost no
conflict between automobiles in Fig. 18(a). It is worth noting that the interactions between the two vehicle types are quite significant
comparing to that among automobiles as shown in Fig. 18(c).
Similarly, for the Type II Conflict in Fig. 19, the motorcycles account for the most significant portion of the conflicts. Especially, in
Figs. 19(b) and 19(c), the frequencies of conflict are much higher than that in Fig. 19(a). In Fig. 19(c), the interactions between the two
vehicle types are significant. This shows potential effectiveness of utilizing the Type II Conflict in the mixed traffic flow to reveal spatial
conflicts.
4.5.2. GuanDu Bridge, New Taipei City

In this section, a portion of the GuanDu Bridge in New Taipei City, Taiwan was selected to illustrate the applicability of the
15
Fig. 18. Type I Conflict (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).
proposed approach on expressways. In Fig. 20, traffic conflicts and the road geometry of the GuanDu Bridge are presented.
Both Type I Conflicts and Type II Conflicts are concentrated in the outside lanes in both directions, where more motorcycles travel.
Type I Conflicts are concentrated in the bottom left region. Since the conflict region is located at the junction of the through lane and
ramp, it is reasonable to presume that the Type I Conflicts were caused by the confluence of vehicles from the two directions, and
converging traffic in the lower gore into the main channel. The Type II Conflict also captures these conflict. However, it highlights
there are significantly more conflicts along the strait portions of the bridge. These conflicts are those when two vehicles travels parallel,
while the Safety Space was invaded.
5. Discussion
Based on the analysis in the previous section, discussions of findings, limitations and future works are given in this section.
5.1. Findings
Evaluation of accident probability is difficult in the micro level. Because accidents are rare events, the aggregated number of traffic
16
Fig. 19. Type II Conflict (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).
accidents might not provide the sufficient amount of information at the desired spatial granularity. The conflict severity can be
evaluated by the number of traffic conflicts or the proportion of traffic conflicts. Different surrogate highlights different characteristics
of the traffic flow and conflict severity. In the mixed traffic flow with motorcycles, having high mobility and frequent swerving be
haviors, the dynamics of the traffic flow is very different from that of automobile dominated traffic.
In this study, the Safety Space provides the view of a spatial comfort zone drivers maintain apart from other vehicles. If two vehicles
are driving with very high speed in the same direction without maintaining a proper distance from each other, the Safety Space
captures this potential conflict. As long as there is the invasion of another vehicle into the Safety Space boundary, regardless of the
relative speed, a conflict is detected.
In mixed traffic flows composed of automobiles and motorcycles, the latter vehicle type is prone to be part of a traffic conflict.
Reasons for this include its higher degree of freedom of kinematic movements and smaller Safety Space clearance. Additionally,
because motorcycles have smaller body volume, they tend to travel in between automobiles and move freely without considering lane
markings as strict boundaries. As a result, under heavier traffic, motorcycles move as finer grain particles and threaten the safety of
other motorcycles or automobiles.
Nguyen et al. (2014) utilized the Safety Space to model motorcycles’ behavior of non-lane-based movements (Nguyen, 2012;
Nguyen and Hanaoka, 2013). Although they have also conducted conflict analysis for motorcycle traffic streams, the conflict surrogate
17
Fig. 20. Traffic Conflict Distribution (GuanDu Bridge).
was the DR. In Hou et al. (2014), the buffer is utilized for TTC calculation. Chen et al. (2017, 2019) also adapted an object based
tracking methodology, for the trajectory extraction from image data, and proposed the Relative Time to Collision (RTTC) as the
surrogate indicator for the conflicts between pedestrians and automobiles. The RTTC is the time difference between the first road user’s
arrival and the second road user’s arrival at the trajectory intersection, if they keep their current speeds. In other words, the TTC is
when the RTTC is zero. In Zhang et al. (2012)’s work, the vehicle is represented with a two meter long segment in front of the vehicle.
The conflict point is measured with the intersection point of the pedestrian’s trajectory and that segment’s trajectory. The potential
hazard caused by offtracking of the rear tires is not studied. In summary, conflicts are detected in the aforementioned studies only
18
when there is relative speed or intersection of vehicle trajectories involved.

In this work, we have taken into account the Safety Space when conducting the conflict analysis. When there is no relative speed nor
intersection of vehicle trajectories, conflicts due to closeness in proximity can still be determined. This provides an additional op
portunity to the existing body of knowledge to capture risks associated with spatial closeness. The Safety Space enables finer grain
measurements of conflict locations and also conflict times.
5.2. Limitations
For different problems, suitable methodologies should be applied. In this work, the Safety Space was based on data collected from
an UAV. The reason of this selection of technology is due the requirement for spatial accuracy to form the Safety Space. To generalize
this approach to data collected from surveillance cameras with a specific installation height and angle, adjustments are required and
challenges need to be addressed.
Among many difficulties, occlusion is a major challenge in object detection. When capturing images from UAVs, there is almost no
occlusion between interested objects, such as automobiles and motorcycles. Additionally, the shape of the object will not change when
objects move from one location of the image to another. However, if images are captured in a different angle, the aforementioned
properties are lost. Usual surveillance cameras capture those objects blocking each other, and objects’ appearance may change within
the image field of view.
Based on the different severity of the occlusion, there are different remedies. When the object is only blocked by other objects in a
short period of time, there is chance to recover the miss detections caused by occlusion in the tracking stage. Through the detected
results before and after the occlusion, there is chance to still track the object through methods such as the Kalman filter to estimate the
object’s position through kinematic relationships. In this case, object based tracking (and feature based tracking) should have good
chance to maintain their performance.
When the object is entirely blocked by another object throughout the time of the image sequence, there is no chance for any image
based tracking methodology to learn about the vehicle.
However, it is when the vehicle is partially occluded when the difference of object based and feature based tracking occur. For
object based tracking methods, partial occlusion could have a spatial shift to the detected object, or have completely caused the
detector to miss the detection of the object. As a result, the tracking could be compromised by this poor performance in the detection
stage. In this case, part based object detection could be utilized (Angah and Chen, 2020b; Felzenszwalb et al., 2010). On the other hand,
as long as there are features being picked up by the feature tracker, that portion of the vehicle could potentially be tracked.
In ordinary traffic flow with a high proportion of automobiles, the object based and feature based tracking could still suit the
purpose of conflict analysis. The reason is that the estimates of the vehicles’ state, such as position, velocity and acceleration, still
provide enough precision when vehicles behave in a car following fashion. Conflict surrogates could be derived based on relative
longitudinal and lateral relationships of vehicles. However, in a mixed traffic with motorcycles traveling in almost lane free move
ments, spatial precision becomes critical to evaluate distance, velocity and acceleration.
Because spatial precision is critical in this study for the formation of the Safety Space, the positions of the vehicles have to be very
accurate. If the relative positions between vehicles have great deviations from the actual, the Safety Space will be affected.
If this study is to be applied to utilize surveillance cameras, suggestion will be to adapt deep learning based methods for object
detection (He et al., 2017; Angah and Chen, 2020b) or even occluding object removals through image-to-image translations (Angah
and Chen, 2020a). Those models have shown to perform relatively well in image scenes with occlusion.
5.3. Future Works
There are many directions for extension of this work. A direct step is to form a simulation model to study the change in the conflicts
of the mixed traffic flow under different road geometric setups. Specific characteristics related to particular modes could also be
studied in depth.
Different collision patterns could also be investigated if collision image sequences could be acquired. Perhaps image based methods
could help draw collision diagrams, and traffic conflicts could be reasoned and classified into recurring patterns, provided that vec
torized data are extracted from actual traffic videos.
In the transition stage from usual traffic to a stream of pure self driving vehicles, the Safety Space could also provide user safety
perception to the decision modules of autonomous vehicles.
As previously discussed, different surrogate highlights different characteristics of the traffic behavior and conflict severity. To
capture specific traffic characteristics and the risks associated, combinations of different conflict surrogates also provide opportunities
for future studies.
In mixed traffic flows with the present of motorcycles, evasive action-based indicators could also be investigated together with the
Safety Space. For example, the Deceleration Rate to Avoid a Crash (DRAC) is define to be the differential speed between a following
vehicle and its corresponding lead vehicle (Almqvist et al., 1991). The Crash Potential Index (CPI) further measures the probability
when the DRAC of a given vehicle exceeds its Maximum Available Deceleration Rate (MADR) in a given time interval (Cunto and
Frank, 2007). Jerk, the derivative of the acceleration, could also be investigated for the behavior of motorcycles in safety critical events
considering acceleration profiles (af Wåhlberg, 2000; Bagdadi and Várhelyi, 2013; Zaki et al., 2014).
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6. Conclusions
In this work, we extracted and analyzed vehicle trajectories under the mixed traffic flow for motorcycles and automobiles. Data
were collected from an UAV, and vehicle trajectories were automatically extracted by utilizing computer vision and image processing
techniques.
We propose to investigate traffic conflict through the Safety Space. We believe the Safety Space is a user behavior based boundary,
and should be measured from data. Based on the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first attempt of utilizing this concept of
Safety Space for direct measurement of traffic conflicts.
Through the investigation of the Safety Space in mixed traffic flows composed of automobiles and motorcycles, the following are
observed.
• There is a Safety Space boundary in proximity of the body of the vehicle. Drivers keep this clearance apart from other vehicles to
avoid collision.
• This Safety Space forms the boundary of the comfort area drivers perceive as safe when traveling. Invasions of the Safety Space by
other vehicles potentially reveal traffic conflicts.
• From data, we see that the motorcycles have a smaller Safety Space. They tolerate less distance from other vehicles. A potential
reason of this is that motorcycles do not have the outer frame, and perhaps have a better sense of distance comparing to
automobiles.
• In mixed traffic flows, when one vehicle type is much more flexible in kinematics than others, the traffic conflicts contributed from
spatial proximity could be revealed through the Safety Space.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that there is no competing interest.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Zhou-Tsang Tsung Foundation for grant 107-S-A03, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of
Taiwan for grants MOST-103–2221-E-002–125-MY3 and MOST-108–2221-E-002–016, and National Taiwan University (NTU) for
grants NTU-107L892501 and NTU-108L892501 that has made this work possible. The authors genuinely thank the editors and all of
the reviewers for their time and invaluable comments.
Appendix A. Tracking in Images
This section provides introduction to tracking methodologies in image sensing, and also the comparison of the object tracking with
the KLT tracker.
A.1. Tracking methodologies in images
Image based methods for acquisition of vehicle trajectories are mainly achieved through tracking approaches. The first notable
tracking approach is optical flow based approaches, and the second is feature based tracking. The optical flow based method analyzes
pixels in consecutive images, and the vector field of a spatio-temporal deviation of brightness variation is carried out. In other words,
the motion of the brightness change is tracked. However, this approach is very sensitive to light changes in the environment. A
representative method is the Lucas-Kanade flow. However, the method is effective when motions are in general small between images,
the brightness of image pixels are consistent, and neighboring pixels move collectively consistent toward the same direction.
On the other hand, at a more aggregated level, tracking is done through tracing of features in the image. These features are special
positions with specific characteristics in its appearance. Feature tracking is composed of two steps. The first is feature detection. Then,
based on the location of the detected features, tracking methods are applied for consecutive frames. Well known features include Haar
like features, Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), Local Self-
Similarity (LSS), and the Shi-Tomasi corner detector (also called the Kanade-Tomasi corner detector) (Shi and Tomasi, 1994). Tracking
methods commonly used are the Kalman filter and the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker.
To be able to distinguish what objects are being processed, classification is of importance. These objects need to be classified by
type (Ismail et al., 2009). The aforementioned methods of tracking can track pixels and feature points. However, we do not know what
types of objects are being tracked, and what specific position on the object is being analyzed. As a result, an object based tracking is of
value.
The tracking is very much similar to feature tracking, except that the object tracker is now tracking a position of a detected object,
rather than just an image feature. As a result, object classification is to be conducted before the tracking step. The Histogram of
Oriented Gradients (HOG) (Wang et al., 2009) is a feature that provides the contour of objects and when utilized together with a
classifier such as an Artificial Neural Network, Random Forest, or the Support Vector Machine (SVM), objects could be classified and
localized. With the positions of the objects, trackers such as the Kalman filter can be applied.
Although the KLT tracker has been widely used in the domain of transportation for trajectory extraction (Xie et al., 2019; Saunier
20
Fig. A.21. The KLT Tracker for the Mixed Traffic Flow Data.
and Sayed, 2006; Sayed et al., 2013), the method produces and tracks many feature points, and thus clustering such as the k-means
method or the Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (Xie et al., 2019) are required to group feature points for the identification of
individual vehicles in the image. For traffic flows composed of mainly passenger vehicles, the KLT is effective, and classification of
vehicle types could be quite straightforward. However, for more complicated mix of vehicle types, an alternative approach could be
beneficial. Especially, to distinguish motorcycles and automobiles, the KLT tracker might not be the most suitable model.
A.2. Comparison with the KLT feature tracker
We investigate whether the proposed approach has advantage over the KLT. For interested readers, programming modules
21
Fig. A.22. Clustering of Feature Points from the KLT Tracker.
available are provided by Birchfield (2020).

When utilizing the KLT tracker, there are many parameters to be adjusted such as the minimal accepted quality of image corners.
This minimum quality level (MQL) value is multiplied by the best corner quality measure, and corners with the quality measure less
than the product are rejected. In addition, the maximum number of corners (MCs) to produce, minimum possible Euclidean distance
between the returned corners, and the size of an average block for computing a derivative covariation matrix over each pixel
neighborhood are all parameters to be given.
When utilizing the KLT tracker, we hope to have features tracked on each vehicle. If there are no features being tracked on a
particular vehicle, that vehicle will not be tracked at all.
Fig. A.21 depicts results from the KLT tracker. Fig. A.21(a) shows the result where the MQL is set at 0.3 and MCs to be 500. Some
automobiles are not tracked and some have more than one feature point being tracked. Same results are observed in motorcycles. In an
22
attempt to reduce the multiple tracks on a single vehicle, we reduce the MCs to 30, and the results are shown in Fig. A.21(b). Although
many tracks have been eliminated, some vehicles still have multiple tracking points.
To increase the tracking points so that miss detections can be tracked, we lower the MQL to 0.1 and MCs is set to be 500, as shown in
Fig. A.21(c). There are many more tracking points now, and all vehicles are being tracked. To reduce the amount of tracks, we reduce
the MCs to 30, and the results are shown in Fig. A.21(d). Although many tracks have been eliminated, some vehicles are missed and
some still have multiple tracking points.
To filter out those tracking points that should be part of the stationary background, we applied the Adaptive Gaussian Mixture
model for image segmentation, and the results are shown in Fig. A.21(e). Many of the tracks are now filtered out. Each vehicle now has
many tracking points. However, when we reduce the MCs to 30 as shown in Fig. A.21(f), many vehicles are now lost, while some
vehicles still have many tracks.
We can add more tracking points by lowering the MQL to 0.05 as shown in Fig. A.21(g) and (h) for the cases with MCs set to 500,
and 30 respectively.
In this study of the KLT tracker, we observe that the method produces and tracks many feature points. To be able to identify in
dividual vehicles, some clustering methods (Han et al., 2011; Xie et al., 2019) such as the k-means method, the Gaussian Mixture
Model, the Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model, the Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), and
the Normalized Cut Algorithm (Shi and Malik, 2000) are required. Through these models, the feature points are then able to be
distinguished into potential vehicles such as motorcycles and automobiles. Studies on the clustering algorithms are listed in Fig. A.22.
In the k-means method and the Gaussian Mixture Model, the cluster number should be given. In other words, the number of vehicles
in the image should be provided. This is not easily acquirable. In Fig. A.22(a) and (b), the k value of 34 is provided. However, many
automobiles are separated into many clusters, while motorcycles are merged into a single cluster. The more advanced Dirichlet process
Gaussian mixture model determines the suitable amount of clusters automatically, based on some parameter setups. In Fig. A.22(c), we
attempt to have automobiles formed with the correct feature points. However, this results in motorcycles being grouped into a single
object. On the other hand, in Fig. A.22(d) we separate individual motorcycles, but automobiles are then subdivided into pieces. This
phenomenon reoccurs when utilizing a density based clustering, such as the DBSCAN, in Fig. A.22(e) and (f). We’ve also attempted to
group feature points by the image color with the Normalized Cut Algorithm that segments images based on the color feature, as shown
in Fig. A.22(g) and (h). However, the feature points are not easily clustered into motorcycles and automobiles.
Through the previous study on feature point clustering, we observed that if clusters of tracking points can be spatially distinguished
with a clear boundary of clearance, then the KLT tracker should be suitable for this study of mixed traffic conflict. For traffic flows
composed of mainly passenger vehicles, this spatial clearance is obvious, and the KLT is very effective in trajectory extraction.
However, for more complicated mix of vehicle types, such as the problem in this study with many motorcycles traveling close to
each other and to automobiles, the KLT is not the best tracker, because motorcycles traveling in groups could be easily mis-classified as
an automobile.
In addition, in this work, the Safety Space requires accurate relative position information among vehicles. The KLT tracks vehicles
with many features, but not with evenly distributed feature points on a single vehicle. As a result, surrogate locations such as the
central point of a vehicle is not straightforwardly determined: we cannot merely use the weighted center of the tracking points to
represent the location of the vehicle being tracked. As a result, an alternative approach to the KLT is required for mixed traffic flows
with high motorcycle volumes. The proposed object based detection and tracking could seamlessly address these challenges as shown
in Fig. 4.
Appendix B. Surveillance and conflict extraction
In this section, we evaluate the precision of UAV surveillance in Section B.1 and justify the conflict extraction through a controlled
test in Section B.2.
Fig. B.23. Surveillance Measurement Test of UAV Camera.
23
Fig. B.24. Controlled Experiment for Conflict Extraction.
B.1. Surveillance measurement test
We conduct a surveillance measurement test to study the precision provided by the camera carried by the UAV. We use homog
raphy transformation (Faugeras et al., 1992) to project the recorded images onto a flat image plane. Although the UAV provides top-
view images of the view of interest, the camera itself still has distortion. As a result, this step is to correct the distortion from the
camera.
The actual distances are measured in the scene shown in Fig. B.23, and compare with the measured distances from the image
analysis. The error in the horizontal direction is 1.85% (along the direction of the blue line in Fig. B.23), while the vertical is 2.06%
(along the green line in Fig. B.23). For the data collected in this work, vehicles move in the horizontal direction of the camera.
B.2. Controlled experiment for the traffic conflict detection
We conduct a set of experiment of the proposed conflict detection in a controlled setting. The test is composed of 2 motorized two
wheelers: a front motorcycle and a following motorcycle. The front vehicle is stationed without movement, while the following vehicle
approaches the front vehicle with 2 designed speeds: 15 km/h and 30 km/h. In the scene, we draw 2 separate lines: one is the cor
responding distance for the 1 s TTC when the rear motorcycle is traveling at a speed of 15 km/hr, and the other is the TTC when
traveling at speed 30 km/h. The reason for selecting the 1 s threshold is because during the design phase of the experiment, testings
have shown that the 0.5 s TTC imposes great pressure to the tester, and for safety reasons we have selected the 1 s threshold, which
without loss of generality, shows the effectiveness of capturing the conflict through the proposed approach.
For the two corresponding speeds, the rear motorcycle repeats the approaching to the front vehicle 15 times. As a result, there are
15 sample points for each of the experiments. In Fig. B.24, the scene and results are shown. The following vehicle is moving from the
left to the right, while the front vehicle is stationed at the lower right location of the image, as shown in Fig. B.24(a). The two lines in
white are also shown in the scene, corresponding to the locations of the 1 s TTC threshold for the two speeds. The white vertical line on
the right and left are for the 15 km/hr and 30 km/hr speeds, respectively.
Fig. B.24(b) shows the result for the 15 km/hr case, while Fig. B.24(c) shows the 30 km/hr case. Although the tester attempts to
maintain the speeds of 15 km/hr and 30 km/hr, the exact speeds are hard to achieve. In other words, data with ground truth is difficult
to collect.
The average speeds measured from the image analysis are 16.38 km/h and 27.8 km/h, and standard deviations 1.43 and 0.8
respectively. The student’s t test suggests t-values of 3.61 and − 10.69, respectively corresponds to p-values of 0.0028 and 0.0000.
Potential sources of errors include that from the autometer of the motorcycle, the driver, ruler used to mark the physical white lines,
subtle movements of the UAV, and pixel length conversion from image.
To investigate how accurate the conversion of the image analysis is, more details should be carefully considered. The blue dots in
Fig. B.24(b) are the locations where the 1 s TTC occur based on the measured speed, and the red line is the averaged location, which is
close to the targeting white line. Furthermore, for the 15 km/h case in Fig. B.24(b), the blue dot closest to the white line corresponds to
the sample with speed 15.56 km/h, while for the 30 km/h case in Fig. B.24(c), the blue dot closest to the white line corresponds to the
sample with speed 28.98 km/h. These show that the image analysis do provide meaningful measurements.
In this section, we evaluate the precision of UAV surveillance in Section B.1 and a 1.85% error of distance measurement in the
24
vehicle moving direction is discovered. The conflict extraction is justified through a controlled test in Section B.2. Although the red
lines do not coincide with that of the expected white lines in the designed experiments, the deviations are results of the variations of
traveling speeds during the experiment of the rear vehicle.
Appendix C. Study of video length
When surveying and analyzing for the Safety Space, it is informative to know the required amount of data. The traditional sample
size estimate n, shown in the following equation
s2
n=c⋅ (C.1)
e2
√̅̅̅
is usually used, where s/ n is the standard error of the mean, s2 the sample variance, e the error tolerance limit, and c a constant. A
confidence level of 95% is assured if c = 3.84 and 99.7% if c = 9.00. This is based on the central limit theorem, and thus the shape of
the distribution should be a Gaussian. If the shape of the Safety Space is of a bell shape, this estimate is of applicability. However, if the
Fig. C.25. Demonstration of Convergence of Heatmap Boundary: from top to bottom are of data accumulation times 2.30, 8.00, 26.40, and 52.70 s,
respectively. The left column shows the accumulated heatmaps, and the right column shows the slices of accumulation at position 0.0 along the x
axis of the heatmaps. The horizontal axis of the accumulations in the right column is the y axis of the heatmaps, while the vertical axis represents the
accumulation of vehicle positions.
25
Fig. C.26. Demonstration of Convergence of Heatmap Boundary, Continued: from top to bottom are of data accumulation time 67.40, 293.13,
431.03, and 565.30 s.
shape of the distribution differs from a bell shape significantly, then a theoretical size estimate is of challenge. As shown in Figs. C.25
and C.26, the distribution is neither on the entire domain of the y axis nor the half space of the y axis close to a bell shape. Never the
less, if we have a sample size greater than 30, the estimate can still be used in practice.
However, the aforementioned sample size estimate n is for the mean y. In this work, WM and WC are calibrated by the field data
based on the minimum acceptable lateral clearance from 99% of other vehicles. As a result, an ad hoc data driven approach to
determine sample size is in need.
In Figs. C.25 and C.26, a study on how long the traffic video should be recorded is presented. The left column shows the accu
mulated heatmaps, and the right column shows the slices of accumulation at position 0.0 along the x axis of the heatmap. The hor
izontal axis of the accumulations in the right column is the y axis of the heatmap, while the vertical axis represents the accumulation of
vehicle positions. In other words, figures on the right column are slices at position 0.0 along the x axis of figures on the left column. The
video in this case study is of length 565.30 s. Fig. C.25 shows the accumulation of positions at frames 2.30, 8.00, 26.40, and 52.70 s of
the video, while Fig. C.26 depicts that at times 67.40, 293.13, 431.03, and 565.30 s.
Through this case study, we can see that the modes of the heatmap, 1.25 m and − 1.25 m along the y-axis of the headmap which is
the vertical axis of the left column in Fig. C.25, horizontal axis of the right column, has converged at 26.40 s. Although using all data
should be more representative of the traffic, the modes could be identified much earlier. As a rule of thumb, if the modes do not change
in consecutive 30 s (900 frames with a 30 FPS video stream), we can choose to terminate the analysis. However, if after the entire
26
duration of the video stream and the modes still fluctuate between positions, it is a strong indicator that more data should be collected.
For the following analysis, although early termination provides better computational performance, we use all collected data to
calculate the heatmaps.
Appendix D. Time-to-collision (TTC)
After acquiring the kinematic parameters of vehicles, further analysis of traffic conflicts is conducted. The TTC reflects the
interaction intensity among vehicles and has often been used to assess traffic conflicts. TTC was defined by Hayward (Hayward, 1971)
as the time required for two vehicles to collide if the speed and path of both vehicles remained unchanged. By projecting the future
trajectories with the current kinematic state, when will a collision occur can be estimated.
The lower the TTC value the higher the severity of the traffic conflict. The calculation of the TTC can be conducted by using the
following relationship:
xi − xj − li
TTCi = ∀ẋi > ẋj (D.1)
ẋi − ẋj
where xi and xj indicate the position of vehicle i and vehicle j respectively; ẋi and ẋj are the speeds of the vehicles; and li is the length of
vehicle i (Minderhoud and Bovy, 2001).
The vehicles’ acceleration is not taken into consideration in Eq. D.1. The TTC evaluation is applied only in one-dimension, and
solely considers the case of rear-end collision. Because vehicles driving in different lanes might also have side collisions and turn
collisions, it is necessary to revise the TTC (Charly and Mathew, 2017) into a 2-dimensional problem, together with the consideration
of acceleration (Hou et al., 2014; Charly and Mathew, 2017). To achieve this, the kinematic variables should be vectors rather than
scalars.
The trajectories collected in the tracking phase of this proposed work assume vehicles as points, but we need to consider the body of
vehicles. The TTC need to be able to address the lane-changing situation and apply to the mixed traffic flow.
In the calculation phase of TTC, we use the circle algorithm (Hou et al., 2014) to speed up the computation. Recorded videos are
analyzed for each frame per second (FPS) in the proposed work. In standard modern cameras, the FPS is at least 30. In other words,
there are great amounts of computations. Although the shape of the circles does not match well with the shape of vehicles, the lim
itation does not imply that the use of circles should be omitted, because it could be a valuable pre-screening procedure (Hou et al.,
2014). To alleviate the computation for better efficiency, the circle algorithm is used as temporal and spatial filters to pre-screen when
TTC calculations are required.
In the circle algorithm, the shape of the vehicles is first approximated with a buffered circumscribed circle of the vehicle. To
determine whether there is conflict between the two vehicles, we check if a vehicle pair has buffered circumscribed circles externally
tangent to each other. In other words, we check if the distance between the centroid of the two vehicles is equal to the sum of the two
buffered radii, ri and rj . By the Pythagorean theorem, the distance can be expressed in the following equation:
2
1 1 1 1
(ri + rj )2 = [xxi + ẋxi ⋅ TTCij + ẍxi ⋅ TTC2ij − (xxj + ẋxj ⋅ TTCij + ẍxj ⋅ TTC2ij )] + [xyi + ẋyi ⋅ TTCij + ẍyi ⋅ TTC2ij − (xyj + ẋyj ⋅ TTCij + ẍyj
2 2 2 2
⋅ TTC2ij )]2 (D.2)
where TTCij is the unknown value of TTC between vehicles i and j; xxi and xyi are the centroid position of vehicle i in the x-direction and
y-direction respectively; ẋxi and ẋyi are the x- and y-components of the driving speed for vehicle i; ẍxi and ẍyi are the x- and y-com
ponents of the acceleration for vehicle i; and ri and rj are the radii of the buffer circle for vehicle i and j, respectively.
Given the radii, centroid positions, speeds, and accelerations, the TTC in Eq. D.2 can be easily obtained through the formula for
quartic functions. The TTC computed by approximating vehicles, i and j, into their circumscribed circles, with radius rcirc i and rcirc
j , is
ij
named TTCbigcir and is actually a lower bound of the real TTCij . In other words, if there is a collision between two vehicles, the exact
ij
moment at which the collision occurs will be later than TTCbigcir .
Similarly, if we use the inscribed circle, with radius rinsc
i and rinsc
j of the vehicles i and j, then the vehicles geometrically overlaps each
Fig. D.27. The Calculation Process of Time-to-collision (TTC).
27
ij
other when the inscribed circles are tangent to each other. This means there must already been a collision at the time of TTCsmacir which
can be seen as the upper bound of TTCij .
To illustrate the approach, we start with a construction in the following without considering the buffer in the radius. A pair of
vehicles, in a particular frame, is evaluated for their TTC if their circumscribed circles are tangent to each other, or their distance is
smaller than ri + rj . Once there is a vehicle pair satisfying this condition, we project each of the vehicles’ state based on their current xxi ,
ij
xyi , ẋxi , ẋyi , ẍxi , and ẍyi , and determine when there is the tangent of their inscribed circles to find TTCsmacir . The TTC for these two vehicles
ij ij
are projected for every future time step (0.05 s) between TTCbigcir and TTCsmacir , as shown in Fig. D.27, and their collision time is
determined when their contour outline touches each other.
With different thresholds of TTC, the radii ri and rj in Eq. D.2 of the circumscribed circles are adjusted with a buffer. A rule of thumb
is to set the buffer radius rth circ
i to be the sum of the circumscribed radius ri and the value of TTC threshold TTCth multiplied by the
current speed ẋi of the vehicle i.
1
rith = ẋi ⋅ TTCth + ẍ ⋅ TTCth2 + ricirc (D.3)
2
When determining a conflict, the threshold value of TTC is, without loss of generality, set at 0.5 s. This value is used in transportation
and human factor related studies as a very strict bound for screening conflicts (Essa and Sayed, 2018), while values such 0.7 (Green,
2000) or 1.5 (Zheng et al., 2018b) could also be studied by changing this threshold. It is also reasonable to believe that trajectories of
vehicles, particularly motorcycles, are very dynamic in mixed traffic flows in practice. As a result, actual conflicts are more consistent
to the predicted trajectories within shorter time intervals into the future. In other words, 0.5 s should be more representative than
predictions in longer intervals such as 1.0 s or 3.0 s into the future. The conflicts derived from a more strict TTC bound show results
more close to reality.
Appendix E. Heatmaps for traffic conflicts
For the figures (such as Fig. 14), the visualization is through density-based heatmaps (Silverman, 1986). The frequencies for the two
types of conflicts are in different orders. Type I Conflict is in the order of 10− 5 while Type II Conflict is in 10− 4 . To provide the readers
with a sense of the unit, consider a video of 30 min. This time duration translates to 30 ⋅ 60 seconds, and thus 30 ⋅ 60 ⋅ 30 frames if the
FPS is 30. As a result, a single conflict in a spatial unit results to a frequency of 1.8 ⋅ 10− 5 value. For density based heatmaps, a single
incident is commonly spread into neighboring spatial units to have a soft impact to the local region, centered at the incident. The value
added to the local region will then be adjusted based on the kernel function selected, such as using a uniform or Gaussian kernel,
integrating to be the unit frequency. For example, if the impact is contributed to a 3 by 3 grid around the incident unit using a uniform
kernel, the 1.8 ⋅ 10− 5 will then be evenly added to the 9 grids each having a value of 2.0 ⋅ 10− 6 value.
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Transportation Research Part C 119 (2020) 102744

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Transportation Research Part C

Conflict analytics through the vehicle safety space in mixed traffic

3.1. Vehicle detection and tracking

3.2. Safety space

Intersection Xinhai-Roosevelt Roosevelt-Shinsheng S. Sala BKC

4.1. Data description

4.2. Detection results

Vehicle Type AMa MCb AM MC AM MC AM MC Tukc

GT 485 608 574 1,194 506 329 178 134 247

Fig. 4. Illustration of Vehicle Tracking in the Mixed Traffic Flow.

4.3. General traffic flow characteristics extraction

Fig. 5. Lane Distribution of Vehicle Count at the Xinhai-Rosevelt Intersection.

Fig. 6. Lane Distribution of Vehicle Speed at the Xinhai-Rosevelt Intersection.

4.4. Safety space from data

4.4.1. Data in the heatmap representation

Fig. 7. Heatmaps of Relative Position: Motorcycles.

Fig. 8. Heatmaps of Relative Position: Automobiles.

4.4.2. Heatmaps from data

4.4.3. Safety space adjustments from observed data

Fig. 9. Comparison between Heatmaps and Safety Space (Xinhai-Roosevelt).

4.4.4. Interactions from different sources of vehicle types

4.5. Traffic conflict analysis

Transportation Research Part C 119 (2020) 102744

Fig. 10. Heatmaps of Motorcycles with Different Speed (Xinhai-Roosevelt).

Fig. 11. Heatmaps of Automobiles with Different Speed (Xinhai-Roosevelt).

Fig. 12. Heatmaps of Relative Position for Motorcycles (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).

Fig. 13. Heatmaps of Relative Position for Automobiles (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).

Fig. 14. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Xinhai-Roosevelt).

Fig. 15. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).

are derived during the state of a more steady flow of traffic.

Fig. 16. Traffic Conflict Distribution (Sala Road).

Fig. 17. Traffic Conflict Distribution (BKC Intersection).

4.5.1. Conflict sources from different vehicle types

4.5.2. GuanDu Bridge, New Taipei City

Fig. 18. Type I Conflict (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).

Fig. 19. Type II Conflict (Roosevelt-Shinsheng S.).

Fig. 20. Traffic Conflict Distribution (GuanDu Bridge).

when there is relative speed or intersection of vehicle trajectories involved.

5.3. Future Works

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that there is no competing interest.

Appendix A. Tracking in Images

A.1. Tracking methodologies in images

A.2. Comparison with the KLT feature tracker

Fig. A.22. Clustering of Feature Points from the KLT Tracker.

available are provided by Birchfield (2020).

Appendix B. Surveillance and conflict extraction

Fig. B.23. Surveillance Measurement Test of UAV Camera.

Fig. B.24. Controlled Experiment for Conflict Extraction.

B.1. Surveillance measurement test

B.2. Controlled experiment for the traffic conflict detection

Appendix C. Study of video length

Appendix D. Time-to-collision (TTC)

Fig. D.27. The Calculation Process of Time-to-collision (TTC).

Appendix E. Heatmaps for traffic conflicts

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