IMPACT: Integrated Multimodal Pipeline for Rapid Accident Causality Tracking (Student Abstract)

Abstract Traffic accidents pose a significant societal challenge, with many fatalities being avoidable through timely emergency response. We introduce IMPACT (Integrated Multimodal Pipeline for Rapid Accident Causality Tracking), a scalable AI framework designed for autonomous, rapid traffic incident analysis using existing urban CCTV infrastructure. IMPACT combines a low-latency CPU-based vision module for real-time key-frame filtering (24 FPS) with the causal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, reducing costly MLLM calls by over 92% compared to naive sparse sampling. We further present TRACE10K, a dataset featuring three-tier textual annotations that describe accident dynamics at the frame-sequence level.