A Unified Probabilistic Approach to Traffic Conflict Detection

Abstract: Traffic conflict detection is essential for proactive road safety by identifying potential collisions before they occur. Existing methods rely on surrogate safety measures tailored to specific interactions (e.g., car-following, side-swiping, or path-crossing) and require varying thresholds in different traffic conditions. This variation leads to inconsistencies and limited adaptability of conflict detection in evolving traffic environments. Consequently, a need persists for consistent detection of traffic conflicts across interaction contexts. To address this need, this study proposes a unified probabilistic approach. The proposed approach establishes a unified framework of traffic conflict detection, where traffic conflicts are formulated as context-dependent extreme events of road user interactions. The detection of conflicts is then decomposed into a series of statistical learning tasks: representing interaction contexts, inferring proximity distributions, and assessing extreme collision risk. The unified formulation accommodates diverse hypotheses of traffic conflicts and the learning tasks enable data-driven analysis of factors such as motion states of road users, environment conditions, and participant characteristics. Jointly, this approach supports consistent and comprehensive evaluation of the collision risk emerging in road user interactions. Our experiments using real-world trajectory data show that the approach provides effective collision warnings, generalises across distinct datasets and traffic environments, covers a broad range of conflict types, and captures a long-tailed distribution of conflict intensity. The findings highlight its potential to enhance the safety assessment of traffic infrastructures and policies, improve collision warning systems for autonomous driving, and deepen the understanding of road user behaviour in safety-critical interactions.