A novel approach for automatic road accident detection is proposed. The approach is based on detecting damaged vehicles from footage received from surveillance cameras installed in roads and highways which would indicate the occurrence of a road accident. Detection of damaged cars falls under the category of object detection in the field of machine vision and has not been achieved so far. In this research, a new supervised learning method comprising of three different stages which are combined into a single framework in a serial manner which successfully detects damaged cars from static images is proposed. The three stages use five support vector machines trained with Histogram of gradients (HOG) and Gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features. Since damaged car detection has not been attempted, two datasets of damaged cars - Damaged Cars Dataset-1 (DCD-1) and Damaged CarsDataset-2 (DCD-2) – was compiled for public release. Experiments were conducted on DCD-1 and DCD-2 which differ based on the distance at which the image is captured and the quality of the images.
