Award of MOE AcRF Tier 1 Call1/2025 Grant - Associate Professor Zhu Feng
Congratulations to Associate Professor Zhu Feng on the award of the MOE AcRF Tier 1 Call 1/2025 for his project — Enhancing Accident Risk Assessment in Rainy Conditions: Detection, Modeling and Validation
About MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant
The Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 provides competitive funding to support research at NTU. Designed to strengthen the University’s research capabilities, the grant nurtures young talent, sustains a broad spectrum of inquiry, and seeds new directions of research. AcRF Tier 1 supports projects with a total project value between S$5,000 and S$200,000, over a duration of up to three years, enabling NTU researchers to pursue high-quality research and build a strong foundation for securing external research grants.
Project Write-up
Singapore’s transportation system faces persistent challenges from heavy tropical rain. Downpours degrade camera-based traffic systems, causing visual artifacts such as streaks, glare, and lens blockage that compromise detection accuracy. Most vision algorithms are trained on fair-weather data, leaving them unreliable in adverse conditions. Current platoon safety models also assume ideal visibility, overlooking the risks from rain-reduced visibility and friction.
This project proposes an integrated framework for rain-resilient perception and traffic safety. A key component is a transformer-based vision module trained on real and synthetic rainy datasets to detect and track vehicles under degraded conditions. Extracted trajectories will support a dynamic Platoon Safety Field, capturing inter-vehicle risk in wet weather. Digital twin simulations of heavy rain will validate the framework, enabling tests of adaptive strategies such as variable platoon spacing.
By combining rain-robust vision, platoon safety modeling, and digital twins, this research offers a novel approach to urban mobility in tropical climates and actionable insights for weather-adaptive transportation systems.
