Real-Time Detection of Near-Miss Events and Risk Assessment in Urban Traffic Using Multi-Object Tracking and Bird’s Eye View Mapping

Near-miss events, defined as hazardous traffic interactions without actual collisions, provide valuable indicators for proactive traffic safety assessment. However, existing studies mainly focus on collision detection or object-level perception, while near-miss interactions and their severity remain insufficiently explored. This study proposes a video-based framework for real-time near-miss detection and risk evaluation in complex urban intersections. The framework integrates an enhanced YOLOv11 detector with a small-object detection head, BoT-SORT multi-object tracking, and bird’s-eye-view (BEV) transformation to accurately extract trajectories and motion features of heterogeneous road users. A Near-Miss Risk Index (RI) is developed by jointly considering spatial proximity, time-to-collision, and motion intensity to quantify near-miss severity levels. Experimental results on real-world CCTV data demonstrate that the proposed method effectively identifies high-risk interactions among vehicles, motorcycles, and pedestrians, providing interpretable severity assessment and supporting proactive traffic safety analysis for intelligent transportation systems.