Comparison of Accident Black Spot Identification Methods based on GPS Coordinates

Seeking for potential road accident black spots (also known as hot spots) is one of the most important tasks of safety experts. There are no widely accepted definitions of black spots, but these are usually well-demarcated areas of the public road network, where the number or seriousness of accidents is higher than expected. Several methods exist in the literature for searching potential black spots, but most of them are based on the traditional road number+section number location identification system. Spreading of the GPS technology made it possible to use a more accurate and convenient way of two-dimensional coordinates to localize road accidents. This paper presents the capabilities of the most used black spot localization techniques (original sliding window, planar sliding window, DBSCAN) based on this new localization system. The evaluation contains both the qualitative and quantitative aspects; considering accuracy, processing speed, convenience, etc.