Vehicle trajectory extraction with interacting multiple model for low-channel roadside LiDAR

High-precision and consistent vehicle trajectories encompass microscopic traffic parameters, mesoscopic traffic flow characteristics, and macroscopic traffic flow features, which is the cornerstone of innovation in data-driven traffic management and control applications. However, occlusion and trajectory interruption remain challenging in multivehicle tracking under complex traffic environments using low-channel roadside LiDAR. To address the challenge, a novel framework for vehicle trajectory extraction using low-channel roadside LiDAR was proposed. First, the geometric features of the cluster and its L-shape bounding box were used to address the over-segmentation in vehicle detection arising from occlusion and point cloud sparse. Then, objects within adjacent point cloud frames were associated by developing an improved Hungarian algorithm integrated with an adaptive distance threshold to solve the mismatching problem caused by objects entrancing and exiting in a new point cloud frame. Finally, an improved interacting multiple model by considering vehicle driving patterns was deployed to predict the location of missing vehicles and connect the interrupted trajectories. Experimental results showed that the proposed methods achieve 98.76 % of vehicle detection accuracy and 97.40 % of data association precision. The mean absolute error (MAE) and mean square error (MSE) of the vehicle position estimation are 0.2252 m and 0.0729 m², respectively. The trajectory extraction precision outperforms most of the state-of-the-art algorithms.