Comparative Analysis of CNN Architectures for Vehicle Accident Damage Classification in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

Traffic accidents are one of the most significant societal problems worldwide, resulting in loss of life and property. In recent years, powerful solutions for the automatic classification of traffic accidents have been offered by deep learning-based image processing methods. This study comparatively evaluated four convolutional neural network architectures (SqueezeNet, ResNet-18, ResNet-50 and AlexNet) with different depths and levels of complexity using the CADD (Car Accidents and Deformation) dataset, which consists of images of vehicle accidents. The model’s performance was examined in detail using accuracy, precision, recall, the F1 score, a confusion matrix and an ROC–AUC analysis. The ResNet-50 model significantly outperformed all others, achieving 52% validation accuracy and balanced F1-score values (~0.50–0.52). It also achieved particularly high precision (0.70), recall (0.79) and AUC (0.922) values in the Totaled class. In contrast, SqueezeNet exhibited significant class bias and struggled to learn the multi-class structure. The AlexNet and ResNet-18 models showed moderate performance, achieving limited success in terms of discriminability, particularly in the ‘Severe’ class. It should be emphasized that the analysis relies on single-frame static images and a relatively small, predefined dataset; the study is therefore intended as a preliminary comparative benchmark rather than a deployable damage-assessment system. Within this scope, the findings indicate that residual architectures such as ResNet-50 are promising candidates for future deep learning-based accident analysis tools, although further validation on larger and more diverse datasets is required prior to their real-world use in traffic safety, insurance assessment, and intelligent transportation applications.