Airborne LiDAR : a new source of traffic flow data.

694087603PDFTech ReportFHWA/OH-2005/14134145Laser radarTraffic flowRemote sensingOhioOhio State UniversityGrejner-Brzezinska, Dorota A.Toth, CharlesMcCord, MarkOhio State UniversityUnited States. Federal Highway AdministrationNTL-OPERATIONS AND TRAFFIC CONTROLS-Traffic FlowNTL-OPERATIONS AND TRAFFIC CONTROLS-Traffic Control DevicesUS Transportation CollectionLiDAR (or airborne laser scanning) systems became a dominant player in high-precision spatial data acquisitionto efficiently create DEM/DSM in the late 90's. With increasing point density, new systems are now able tosupport object extraction, such as extracting building and roads, from LiDAR data. The novel concept of thisproject was to use LiDAR data for traffic flow estimates. In a sense, extracting vehicles over transportationcorridors represents the next step in complexity by adding the temporal component to the LiDAR data featureextraction process. The facts are that vehicles are moving at highway speeds and the scanning acquisitionmode of the LiDAR certainly poses a serious challenge for the data extraction process. The OSU developedmethod and it implementation, the I_FLOW program, have demonstrated that LiDAR data contain valuableinformation to support vehicle extraction, including vehicle grouping and localizations. The classificationperformance showed strong evidence that the major vehicle categories can be efficiently separated. TheI_FLOW program is ready for deployment