Sophisticated automatic incident detection (AID) technology plays a key role
in contemporary transportation systems. Though many papers were devoted to
study incident classification algorithms, few study investigated how to enhance
feature representation of incidents to improve AID performance. In this paper,
we propose to use an unsupervised feature learning algorithm to generate higher
level features to represent incidents. We used real incident data in the
experiments and found that effective feature mapping function can be learnt
from the data crosses the test sites. With the enhanced features, detection
rate (DR), false alarm rate (FAR) and mean time to detect (MTTD) are
significantly improved in all of the three representative cases. This approach
also provides an alternative way to reduce the amount of labeled data, which is
expensive to obtain, required in training better incident classifiers since the
feature learning is unsupervised.Comment: The 15th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITSC 2012