A large number of traffic accidents, especially those involving vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, are due to blind spots for the driver, for example when a vehicle takes a turn with poor visibility or when a pedestrian crosses from behind a parked vehicle. In these accidents, the consequences for the vulnerable road users are dramatic. Autonomous cars have the potential to...

BACKGROUND The Eastern Mediterranean region has the second highest number of road traffic injury mortality rates after the African region based on 2013 data, with road traffic injuries accounting for 27% of the total injury mortality in the region. Globally the number of road traffic deaths has plateaued despite an increase in motorization, but it is uncertain whether this applies to the Region...

We present a vision-based pedestrian tracking system targeting a very specific application: avoiding accidents in the blind spot zone of trucks. Existing blind spot safety systems do not offer a complete solution to this problem. Therefore we propose an active alarm system, which warns the truck driver if vulnerable road users occur in the blind spot zone. Our system is based solely on a vision...

Although prevention of bicycle–motorized-vehicle-crashes will result in significant improvements in bicycle mortality rates, little is known about the actual safety critical events leading up to these crashes. Recently, the understanding of critical events has been advanced by the use of Naturalistic driving techniques. This technique gathers data about driving in ‘natural conditions’ by means ...

In this paper, we present a real-time pedestrian tracker that combines a robust appearance-based pedestrian detector with application-specific constraints and motion information. The targeted application is the automatic detection of vulnerable road users in blind spot cameras on trucks. This application imposes several challenges that need to be tackled. Vulnerable road users are a very divers...

Daytime Running Lights (DRL) on motorcycles have been shown to counteract the inherently lower sensory conspicuity of these vehicles and to significantly improve their safety. The advantage of the use of DRL exclusively by motorcycles is presently becoming lost by the increasing use of DRLs on cars. The present experiment aimed at evaluating the effects of car DRLs on motorcycle perception in a...

s a major public health problem, road traffic injuries (RTIs) affect all social groups of the society.1 Every year, around 1.3 million people die and 20-50 million people get injured or disabled as a result of the RTIs worldwide.2 The figure of RTIs is more alarming in low and middle-income countries (LMICs).1-2 RTIs in Iran are very important public health problems in the whole country.3-6 Whe...

Past research has shown that road users accept shorter time gaps when the waiting time/number of vehicles they let pass before attempting to merge into the traffic increases. While elderly pedestrians are known to be an extremely vulnerable group of road users, very few studies dealt with the effect of environmental constraints and crossing complexity on this population's safety. The present st...