IMAGE-BASED VEHICLE TRACKING FROM ROADSIDE LIDAR DATA

Abstract. Vehicle tracking is of great importance in urban traffic systems, and the adoption of lidar technologies – including on-board and roadside systems – has significant potential for such applications. This research therefore proposes and develops an image-based vehicle-tracking framework from roadside lidar data to track the precise location and speed of a vehicle. Prior to tracking, vehicles are detected in point clouds through a three-step procedure. Cluster tracking then provides initial tracking results. The second tracking stage aims to provide more precise results, in which two strategies are developed and tested: frame-by-frame and model-matching strategies. For each strategy, tracking is implemented through two threads by converting the 3D point cloud clusters into 2D images relating to the plan and side views along the tracked vehicle’s trajectory. During this process, image registration is exploited in order to retrieve the transformation parameters between every image pair. Based on these transformations, vehicle speeds are determined directly based on (a) the locations of the chosen tracking point in the first strategy; (b) a vehicle model is built and tracking point locations can be calculated after matching every frame with the model in the second strategy. In contrast with other existing methods, the proposed method provides improved vehicle tracking via points instead of clusters. Moreover, tracking in a decomposed manner provides an opportunity to cross-validate the results from different views. The effectiveness of this method has been evaluated using roadside lidar data obtained by a Robosense 32-line laser scanner.