A 79GHz Millimeter Wave Radar Based Car and Motorcycle Counter

According to motorization evolution motorcycle ownership gets very high in many Asian cities so that a traffic counter applicable to motorcycles is necessary to improve road traffic environment. On the other hand a 79GHz millimeter wave radar is suitable for such an application as its high resolution and robustness at nighttime and in bad weather. In the paper we propose two methods to detect, classify and count cars (four-wheel vehicles) and motorcycles based on radar measurements of point cloud. One method is a target based approach where vehicles (cars and motorcycles) are extracted and tracked by grouping points and aggregated using a count line. Another method uses point cloud directly and aggregates with a count region. The methods are tested on a public road in Taiwan. The test results show that both methods perform with more than 90% accuracy when counting vehicles totally, but the second method is much better to count cars and motorcycles separately.