Abstract:

Forensic engineering, and particularly forensic reconstruction and analysis of road traffic accidents is interdisciplinary area with high responsibility and need to technically understand complex real-world situation. This real-world situation, i.e. traffic incident (traffic accidents and near-miss incidents) involves road vehicles, human factors from biomechanical and psychological viewpoint, as well as technicalities of road infrastructure. Finally, forensic engineer should also have working understanding of legal matters as the road traffic incident reconstruction and analysis is mostly performed for criminal or civil justice system.

Furthermore, forensic automotive engineer is constantly under pressure from new innovations in transportation and automotive industry as well as from new methods and approaches with respect to the reconstruction of traffic event. One of these emerging approaches is usability and forensic utilization of digital data, particularly digital video data from CCTV cameras of in-vehicle cameras. These recordings have excellent intrinsic value in the forensic work as they store objective information about time-distance relationships of traffic participants involved in traffic incident. The forensic utilization of these video data adds further layer of complexity for work of forensic engineer as knowledge of photogrammetry, projective geometry or digital data encoding is needed.

Therefore, in the work presented we are focusing on strategies used in the education of forensic engineers to effectively and correctly utilize digital video data in the reconstruction and analysis of road traffic incidents.

Keywords:

Traffic accident, reconstruction, videodata, simulation, forensic engineering.