A lidar-based method for the detection and counting of Powered Two Wheelers

The safety of Powered Two Wheelers (PTWs) is important for public authorities and road administrators around the world. Official figures show that PTW represent only 2% of the total traffic on French roads, but as these 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. To date, there is no overall solution to this problem that uses a sensor capable of detecting PTWs and taking into consideration their interaction with the other vehicles on the road (for example: Inter-lane traffic, when PTWs move in between two lanes on a highway), and no state-of-the-art technical solutions can be adapted to measure this category of vehicle in traffic (unlike cars and trucks). The research work in this domain has therefore, not been greatly developed which is an issue of concern. In this paper we present a new method of detecting PTWs by using a single-plane lidar, named the Last Line Check (LLC) method. This method uses the energy of the last scan to extract the information. After extraction, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classification. The LLC method is tested in real time and gives interesting results with a high precision.