Automatic Methodology for Multi-modal Trip Generation with Roadside LiDAR

Transportation planning based on historical data and methods has major limitations. Trip data canbe useful to increase the transportation safety of the specific sites and the process and programming purposes. One of the challenges in this regard is data collecting to gain an accurate analysis of land use development. The previous methods of data gathering such as human observational data counting and automatic methods like pneumatic tubes and video camera suffers some limitations that affect the accuracy of trip analysis which cause over mitigating or set some wrong rules and regulations. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensing is a powerful tool that has been vastly used for mapping, safety, and medical applications. [1] Also, its application in transportation has drawn attention in recent years. However, LiDAR sense is yet to be further explored in trip generation. This study is an initial attempt to: 1) perform a LiDAR-based trip generation data gathering for a local area in midtown, Reno, and 2) analyze the resulting data based on the GIS software to develop a systematic plan for the case study and beyond

Roadside LiDAR Assisted Cooperative Localization for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Advancements in LiDAR technology have led to more cost-effective production while simultaneously improving precision and resolution. As a result, LiDAR has become integral to vehicle localization, achieving centimeter-level accuracy through techniques like Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) and other advanced 3D registration algorithms. Nonetheless, these approaches are reliant on high-definition 3D point cloud maps, the creation of which involves significant expenditure. When such maps are unavailable or lack sufficient features for 3D registration algorithms, localization accuracy diminishes, posing a risk to road safety. To address this, we proposed to use LiDAR-equipped roadside unit and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication to accurately estimate the connected autonomous vehicle's position and help the vehicle when its self-localization is not accurate enough. Our simulation results indicate that this method outperforms traditional NDT scan matching-based approaches in terms of localization accuracy.Comment: Accepted by 2023 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and its Emerging Application

Weighted Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model for Roadside LiDAR Object Detection

Background modeling is widely used for intelligent surveillance systems to detect moving targets by subtracting the static background components. Most roadside LiDAR object detection methods filter out foreground points by comparing new data points to pre-trained background references based on descriptive statistics over many frames (e.g., voxel density, number of neighbors, maximum distance). However, these solutions are inefficient under heavy traffic, and parameter values are hard to transfer from one scenario to another. In early studies, the probabilistic background modeling methods widely used for the video-based system were considered unsuitable for roadside LiDAR surveillance systems due to the sparse and unstructured point cloud data. In this paper, the raw LiDAR data were transformed into a structured representation based on the elevation and azimuth value of each LiDAR point. With this high-order tensor representation, we break the barrier to allow efficient high-dimensional multivariate analysis for roadside LiDAR background modeling. The Bayesian Nonparametric (BNP) approach integrates the intensity value and 3D measurements to exploit the measurement data using 3D and intensity info entirely. The proposed method was compared against two state-of-the-art roadside LiDAR background models, computer vision benchmark, and deep learning baselines, evaluated at point, object, and path levels under heavy traffic and challenging weather. This multimodal Weighted Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) can handle dynamic backgrounds with noisy measurements and substantially enhances the infrastructure-based LiDAR object detection, whereby various 3D modeling for smart city applications could be created

Fiber-optic interferometric sensor for monitoring automobile and rail traffic

This article describes a fiber-optic interferometric sensor and measuring scheme including input-output components for traffic density monitoring. The proposed measuring system is based on the interference in optical fibers. The sensor, based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, is constructed to detect vibration and acoustic responses caused by vehicles moving around the sensor. The presented solution is based on the use of single-mode optical fibers (G.652.D and G.653) with wavelength of 1550 nm and laser source with output power of 1 mW. The benefit of this solution lies in electromagnetic interference immunity and simple implementation because the sensor does not need to be installed destructively into the roadway and railroad tracks. The measuring system was tested in real traffic and is characterized by detection success of 99.27% in the case of automotive traffic and 100% in the case of rail traffic.Web of Science2662995298

Infrastructure-Based Vehicle Localization through Camera Calibration for I2V Communication Warning

In recent years, the research on object detection and tracking is becoming important for the development of advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) aiming to improve safety for all road users involved. Intersections, especially in urban scenarios, represent the portion of the road where the most relevant accidents take place; therefore, this work proposes an I2V warning system able to detect and track vehicles occupying the intersection and representing an obstacle for other incoming vehicles. This work presents a localization algorithm based on image detection and tracking by a single camera installed on a roadside unit (RSU). The vehicle position in the global reference frame is obtained thanks to a sequence of linear transformations utilizing intrinsic camera parameters, camera height, and pitch angle to obtain the vehicle's distance from the camera and, thus, its global latitude and longitude. The study brings an experimental analysis of both the localization accuracy, with an average error of 0.62 m, and detection reliability in terms of false positive (1.9%) and missed detection (3.6%) rates

iDriving: Toward Safe and Efficient Infrastructure-directed Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving will become pervasive in the coming decades. iDriving improves the safety of autonomous driving at intersections and increases efficiency by improving traffic throughput at intersections. In iDriving, roadside infrastructure remotely drives an autonomous vehicle at an intersection by offloading perception and planning from the vehicle to roadside infrastructure. To achieve this, iDriving must be able to process voluminous sensor data at full frame rate with a tail latency of less than 100 ms, without sacrificing accuracy. We describe algorithms and optimizations that enable it to achieve this goal using an accurate and lightweight perception component that reasons on composite views derived from overlapping sensors, and a planner that jointly plans trajectories for multiple vehicles. In our evaluations, iDriving always ensures safe passage of vehicles, while autonomous driving can only do so 27% of the time. iDriving also results in 5x lower wait times than other approaches because it enables traffic-light free intersections

Uses and Challenges of Collecting LiDAR Data from a Growing Autonomous Vehicle Fleet: Implications for Infrastructure Planning and Inspection Practices

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) that utilize LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and other sensing technologies are becoming an inevitable part of transportation industry. Concurrently, transportation agencies are increasingly challenged with the management and tracking of large-scale highway asset inventory. LiDAR has become popular among transportation agencies for highway asset management given its advantage over traditional surveying methods. The affordability of LiDAR technology is increasing day by day. Given this, there will be substantial challenges and opportunities for the utilization of big data resulting from the growth of AVs with LiDAR. A proper understanding of the data size generated from this technology will help agencies in making decisions regarding storage, management, and transmission of the data. The original raw data generated from the sensor shrinks a lot after filtering and processing following the Cache county Road Manual and storing into ASPRS recommended (.las) file format. In this pilot study, it is found that while considering the road centerline as the vehicle trajectory larger portion of the data fall into the right of way section compared to the actual vehicle trajectory in Cache County, UT. And there is a positive relation between the data size and vehicle speed in terms of the travel lanes section given the nature of the selected highway environment