SafeRoute AI

Inspiration

Road accidents often result in severe consequences due to delayed emergency response. Although traffic cameras continuously capture road activity, accident reporting still depends heavily on manual intervention. We were inspired to build SHIELD 1.0, a software-only AI solution that automatically detects accidents from traffic videos and helps prioritize emergency response by assessing accident severity and alerting nearby hospitals.

What It Does

SHIELD 1.0 uses AI-based video analytics to:

Detect road accidents from traffic CCTV footage

Classify accident severity as low, medium, or high

Identify nearby hospitals using location services

Send priority-based alerts to hospitals for faster response

By focusing on severity, the system ensures that critical accidents receive immediate medical attention.

How We Built It

The project is designed as a completely software-based architecture:

Traffic videos act as the input

Deep learning models (CNN / YOLO-based) detect accident events

A severity classification module analyzes collision patterns

Map APIs are used to locate nearby hospitals

Alerts are generated through software notifications (conceptual stage)

This design avoids hardware dependency and is scalable for smart city deployment.

Challenges We Ran Into

Limited publicly available accident detection datasets

Distinguishing real accidents from sudden braking or near-miss events

Defining accident severity using visual features alone

Designing a real-time system without deploying physical infrastructure

What We Learned

Applying computer vision to real-world safety problems

Designing end-to-end AI workflows for video analytics

Importance of severity-based prioritization in emergency systems

Presenting a technically sound idea clearly in a hackathon setting

What Makes SHIELD 1.0 Unique

Fully software-based solution

Goes beyond detection with severity assessment

Focuses on emergency prioritization, not just alerts

Scalable and suitable for urban traffic monitoring

Future Scope

Real-time deployment on live CCTV feeds

Integration with emergency services

Web dashboard for authorities

Model optimization for faster inference

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• cnn
• fastapi
• opencv
• python
• yolo