Abstract: The concept of endorsing AI in embedded systems is growing in all sectors including the development of Accident Avoidance Systems. Although real-time road crash prediction is vital for enhancing road user safety, there has been limited focus on the analysis of real-time crash events within ensemble and deep learning fused systems. The main aim of this paper is to design an advanced Accident Avoidance System established on a deep learning and ensemble fusion strategy in order to acquire more performant crash predictions. As such, four highly optimized models for crash prediction have been designed based on the popular ensemble techniques: CatBoost, AdaBoost and Bagging and the deep learning CNN. Additionally, four categories of features, including driver inputs, vehicle kinematics, driver states and weather conditions, were measured during the execution of various driving tasks performed on a driving simulator. Moreover, given the infrequent nature of crash events, an imbalance-control procedure was adopted using the SMOTE and ADASYN techniques. The highest performances results have been acquired using CatBoost along with ADASYN on almost all the adopted metrics during the different weather conditions, and more than 50% of all crashes have occurred in rainy weather conditions, whereas 31% have been exhibited in fog patterns. The sensitivity analysis results indicate that the fusing all the acquired features has the highest impact on the prediction performance. To our knowledge, there has been a limited interest, if not at all, at adopting a fused ensemble deep learning system examining the real-time impact of the adopted features’ combinations on the prediction of road crashes while taking into account class imbalance. The findings provide new insights into crash prediction and emphasize the relevance of the explanatory features which can be endorsed in designing efficient Accident Avoidance Systems.
