Proactive Safety and Mobility Assessment using LiDAR-based Traffic Monitoring

Proactive Safety and Mobility Assessment using LiDAR-based Traffic Monitoring ( Prof. Aditya Medury, Civil)

This project aims to develop a portable LiDAR-based road traffic monitoring system to analyze road user movements and interactions between them. The LiDAR sensors can be used to isolate the static road environment from dynamic road users given better depth resolution and localization ability under varying visibility conditions when compared to cameras. The point clouds of dynamic road users will be further processed to automate traffic counts, speeds of vehicle trajectories, heatmaps of road utilization as well as the presence of unsafe interactions among road users. The portable data collection setup can help aid the analysis of black spot audits as well help conduct short-term evaluation of changes in design and operational characteristics. The proposed approach is designed to be adaptable to different road settings. The analysis is expected to document a high resolution of mobility and safety metrics that can facilitate short-term assessment of road infrastructure, and complement accident-based studies. Traffic accident-based assessment of road safety relies on historical crash data, which is a reactive process. Crashes are rare events and suffer from underreporting. Consequently, any assessment of risk as well as effectiveness of safety interventions based on crashes alone requires a longer evaluation time frame. In comparison, the proposed approach is proactive in nature.