Abstract
The overall content of this paper is to describe the background and the importance of strategies for reducing traffic accident casualties, the synthesis of scientific approaches for promoting road traffic safety, and the cooperation of G.I.A. (Government/ Industry/Academia), as well as the recent activities conducted by Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (JSAE). Especially, the emphasis here is the introduction of a device called "drive recorder" for a study on incident mechanism from the viewpoint of accident prevention. To reduce the road traffic accidents, it is necessary to clarify the cause of accidents as well as to emphasize the incident analysis, which is the state before the accidents will occur. We believe that the outcomes of these projects can introduce some initiatives of active safety systems to reduce traffic accidents, and this effort led to the settlement of the incident analysis committee in 2004. At the moment of vehicle crash, the crash acceleration reaches to a certain trigger value and activates the start of accident image record, which contains a comprehensive snapshot of the entire crash event about 15 seconds of video images before and after the event. Currently, over 25,000 drive recorders are being used in taxis in Japan. Benefits of equipping drive recorders are (1) data record as post-crash evidence, (2) use of safety education program, (3) improving driving habits of driver, etc. The Heinrich's law is instructive for traffic accident analysis. If we consider the case of real-world traffic accidents, the law suggests that the number of the incidents may be more than 10 times of 1.2 million accidents. Therefore, to promote the significant reduction of road traffic injuries, it is essential to clarify the actual situations bringing out incidents and also investigate the factors involving with accidents and use the obtained understandings to initiate the strategy of road traffic safety. Current Works on Database Construction are (A) Implementation of prototype drive recorders: The two types of drive recorders, widespread type (simple and low cost type) and high-performance type, were implemented. The driver´s image, yaw rate, auxiliary channels are added in the high-performance type, (B) Database construction: About 3000 incident data from 35 taxis equipped with widespread type drive recorder were collected. The number of incident is equivalent to 1.5 times per 1000 km running. In addition, large-scale database construction was conducted for data reading and analysis, and the validation of function and data analysis were carried out.
Keywords -Traffic Safety, Accident, Active Safety, Drive Recorder, Incident Analysis