vehicle safety analysts

Abstract: Estimating accident mechanics from real-world crashes is important for vehicle-safety analysis, injury modeling, crash-severity prediction, and operational workflows such as insurance claim triage. In standard crash records, key metadata such as impact configuration, principal direction of force, and change in velocity ($ΔV$) may be missing, delayed, or corrupted, while post-crash photographs are widely available and contain rich visual evidence of deformation. We study how much crash-mechanics information can be recovered directly from vehicle photos when structured signals are absent. We formulate crash understanding as supervised prediction from per-case multi-view photo sets. Targets include six Collision Deformation Classification (CDC) descriptors and the longitudinal and lateral components of reconstructed $ΔV$. Each photo is encoded by a shared visual backbone, and the resulting view-level features are fused into a case-level representation from which target-specific heads predict crash descriptors. Using 15.2k training cases from the Crash Investigation Sampling System, drawn from about 1.5M photos before filtering, together with 1.15k validation and 1.15k test cases, we define an evaluation protocol for vision-based crash descriptor estimation from incomplete multi-view evidence. Post-crash imagery alone provides usable signal for several non-trivial crash-mechanics descriptors, while weakly observable and long-tailed targets remain challenging. Within the compared training regimes, the selected joint-training recipe reduces mean absolute angular error for principal direction of force from 20.1 to 14.05 degrees and longitudinal $ΔV$ MAE from 8.04 to 7.45 km/h. Our work provides a reference point for future multimodal fusion with structured crash metadata.

Abstract: Many operational cases are documented more than once, at different workflow stages and for different purposes, yet model evaluations normally select one of these records before model comparison begins. We treat that selection as part of the evaluation and compare matched records of the same cases under fixed labels and splits in three systems: GE Aerospace repair events, NASA ASRS safety reports and NHTSA vehicle recalls. Across the three GE fields, for events whose label comes from parts transactions independently of the narratives, held-out macro-F1 ranged from 0.33 to 0.91. A difference of 0.46 separated the customer report, written before shop work, from the technician report, written after diagnosis but before the transaction that generates the label. That difference is substantially larger than the representation and architecture differences tested on the same events. The public systems showed different patterns: the NHTSA defect summary remained strongest under every model family tested, whereas the ASRS analyst synopsis outperformed the reporter narrative under learned sequence models but not under lexical baselines. Secondary analyses showed that some model comparisons were also record-dependent. Evaluations should be run on the information available at the intended decision point and should report how both the record and the label were produced.