Detection and counting of Powered Two Wheelers in traffic using a single-plane Laser Scanner
The safety of Powered Two Wheelers (PTWs) is important for public authorities and roadadministrators around the world. Recent official figures show that PTWs are estimated to represent only 2% of the total traffic but represent 30% of total deaths on French roads. However, as these estimated figures are obtained by simply counting the number plates registered, they do not give a true picture of the PTWs on the road at any given moment. This dissertation comes under the project METRAMOTO and is a technical applied research work and deals with two problems: detection of PTWsand the use of a laser scanner to count PTWs in the traffic. Traffic generally contains random vehicles of unknown nature and behaviour such as speed,vehicle interaction with other users on the road etc. Even though there are several technologies that can measure traffic, for example radars, cameras, magnetometers etc, as the PTWs are small-sized vehicles, they often move in between lanes and at quite a high speed compared to the vehicles moving in the adjacent lanes. This makes them difficult to detect. the proposed solution in this research work is composed of the following parts: a configuration to install the laser scanner on the road is chosen and a data coherence method is introduced so that the system is able to detect the road verges and its own height above the road surface. This is validated by simulator. Then the rawd ata obtained is pre-processed and is transform into the spatial temporal domain. Following this, an extraction algorithm called the Last Line Check (LLC) method is proposed. Once extracted, the objectis classified using one of the two classifiers either the Support Vector Machine (SVM) or the k-Nearest Neighbour (KNN). At the end, the results given by each of the two classifiers are compared and presented in this research work. The proposed solution in this research work is a propototype that is intended to be integrated in a real time system that can be installed on a highway to detect, extract, classify and counts PTWs in real time under all traffic conditions (traffic at normal speeds, dense traffic and even traffic jams).