🚗 Autonomous Vehicle & Road Safety Analysis

Part 1: Vehicle Detection and Localization (ITS Core)

Objective

The goal was to create a deep learning model to perform Object Detection—specifically, predicting the type of vehicle (classification) and identifying its location with a bounding box (localization). This capability is foundational for vehicle tracking and incident response.

Methodology: YOLO Object Detection

We employed the YOLO (You Only Look Once) framework. A training subset of 500 images was used to manage resources, ensuring all required object categories were represented.

Results and Performance

Metric	Result	Interpretation
mAP@0.5	0.413	Good Localization. The model successfully places bounding boxes around vehicles.
mAP@0.5:0.95	0.302	Poor Classification/Precision. The model struggles to accurately classify the vehicle type while maintaining high bounding box precision.

Conclusion on Part 1

The model achieved strong object localization but showed weaknesses in vehicle classification. This is primarily attributed to the limited 500-image training dataset. Future work will involve using a larger dataset to improve classification accuracy.

Part 2: Autopilot Usage and Road Safety Analysis

Objective

To analyze real-world data concerning autopilot usage to identify accident patterns and data reporting issues.

Data Cleaning Highlights

• Missing Data marked as "-" (Unknown) were encoded as -1.
• Extra whitespace was removed from column names and values.
• A reliable `Date_Year` column was engineered to replace the inconsistent original `Year` column.

Key Insights

Accidents by Year and State

Most accidents occurred in 2022, primarily in California.

Accidents by Model

Model S was involved in the most accidents.

Percentage of accidents with Tesla Occupants Deathr

82.3% cases did not involve occupants death.

Density curve of Cyclists/Pedestrians being hit by vehicle

Majority of accidents involved 0 Cyclists/Pedestrians.

Key Conclusions

Finding	Detail	Implication
Accident Peak	Most accidents occurred in the year 2022.	May indicate increased system usage or a reporting spike.
Geographic Hub	Most accidents occurred in CA, USA (California).	Consistent with California being a primary location for AV testing.
Data Limitation	The most frequent vehicle involved was Tesla Model -1 (Unknown).	Critical Finding: Highlights a major issue of missing vehicle model data, limiting specific safety analysis.

Overall Conclusion on Part 2

The high prevalence of "Unknown" data for the vehicle model is the most significant finding. Effective safety analysis requires standardized and complete reporting mechanisms to accurately link incidents to specific vehicle models and autopilot systems.