Traffic accident detection is a critical component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling timely incident response and traffic management. While most existing approaches rely on temporal information from video sequences, such methods are not always applicable in resource-constrained surveillance environments. This study investigates the feasibility of detecting traffic accidents from single static images by formulating the task as a binary classification problem. Representative architectures, including Vision Transformer (ViT), Swin Transformer, and ResNet-50, are systematically evaluated on the Car Crash Dataset (CCD) under multiple training configurations. To assess generalization capability, cross-domain evaluation is conducted using an external crash video dataset (ECVD) constructed to approximate real-world deployment conditions. Experimental results show that all models achieve strong performance under in-domain evaluation. However, cross-domain testing reveals substantial performance degradation, particularly in recall, indicating limited generalization capability under domain shift. Qualitative analysis further shows that missed detections are associated with weak visual cues, occlusion, and complex traffic environments, while false positives are caused by visually ambiguous patterns resembling accident scenarios. Unlike prior studies that primarily report performance improvements, this work provides empirical evidence that model behavior in static-image-based accident detection is governed by dataset composition rather than architectural design. Therefore, static-image-based accident detection should be interpreted as a coarse-level screening tool rather than a fully reliable decision-making system. This study highlights the importance of data-centric design and cross-domain evaluation for improving real-world applicability.
Wu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.