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The timely and accurate detection of traffic incidents is beneficial to reduce associated economic losses and avoid secondary crashes. Inspired by the impressive success of the image classification algorithms, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), this study proposes a novel framework to detect highway traffic incidents by learning the traffic state as images. In such a framework, the probe vehicles equipped with the global positioning system equipment are used to obtain data. The Gramian Angular Difference Fields and Piecewise Aggregation Approximation algorithms are used to convert the link speed time series data into images. CNNs can extract the traffic features based on these images and consider an incident detection problem as a binary classification task. Further, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated by applying it to detect the traffic in a real-world environment, i.e., the Guangzhou Airport Expressway. The results illustrate that the proposed model outperforms several other algorithms with respect to almost all the performance indexes, including the detection rate with different false alarm rates and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.