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In courts and insurance company offices they call them reconstruction experts. They are consulted every time there is a road accident and it is necessary to establish responsibility and estimate the damage. They act as investigators: they look at photographs, study reports, analyze findings, measure the deformations of the sheet metal. In the end, they are able to establish the pre- and post-collision trajectories, know the speed of the cars at the moment of impact, and calculate the damage.
Like other professional categories, traffic accident detectives are also experiencing the power of artificial intelligence (AI). The applications are already a reality. By looking at a photograph of a crashed car, AI is already able to automatically recognize the damaged area, and then quantify the percentage of damage to each affected part. Always observing the photos taken with a normal mobile phone – for example by a traffic policeman at the scene of the accident or by an insurance adjuster in a body shop – artificial intelligence can calculate the impact values: from the deformation energy – according to the Ees standard : equivalent energy speed – to relative speeds, to accelerations. All decisive parameters for understanding the dynamics of an accident.
If it has a video of the crashed car, the AI reconstructs the 3D digital model, which can be viewed from any angle: thus, even an insurance adjuster who is hundreds of kilometers away will be able to observe the damage to the car as if he had it in front of him.
The applications described have been implemented in AutoCrash, an online platform for the management of road accidents developed by two Italian SMEs – Atena and DataVision, respectively active in the field of engineering and computer vision – in collaboration with the University of Bologna. The traffic police department of the Emilia-Romagna capital is also involved in the project.
«The AutoCrash platform – explains Filippo Begani, road accident reconstruction expert and legal representative of Atena – aims to be a digital table shared by all the figures involved in an accident: law enforcement agencies, expert agencies, reconstructors, lawyers, statistical bodies, insurance companies, body shops, judicial authorities. It allows the sharing of accident data and introduces the use of artificial intelligence in the field of road accident reconstruction.”