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Pavement markings, as a crucial component of traffic guidance and safety facilities, are subject to degradation and abrasion after a period of service. To ensure traffic safety, retroreflectivity and diffuse illumination should be above the minimum thresholds and required to undergo inspection periodically. Therefore, an onboard light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and camera deployment optimization method is proposed for pavement marking distress detection to adapt to complex traffic conditions, such as shadows and changing light. First, LiDAR and camera sensors’ detection capability was assessed based on the sensors’ built-in features. Then, the LiDAR–camera deployment problem was mathematically formulated for pavement marking distress fusion detection. Finally, an improved red fox optimization (RFO) algorithm was developed to solve the deployment optimization problem by incorporating a multi-dimensional trap mechanism and an improved prey position update strategy. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method achieves 5217 LiDAR points, which fall on a 0.58 m pavement marking per data frame for distress fusion detection, with a relative error of less than 7% between the mathematical calculation and the field test measurements. This empirical accuracy underscores the proposed method’s robustness in real-world scenarios, effectively mitigating the challenges posed by environmental interference.

By the end of the 2020s, full autonomy in autonomous driving may become commercially viable in certain regions. However, achieving Level 5 autonomy requires crucial collaborations between vehicles and infrastructure, necessitating high-speed data processing and low-latency capabilities. This paper introduces a vehicle tracking algorithm based on roadside LiDAR (light detection and ranging) infrastructure to reduce the latency to 100 ms without compromising the detection accuracy. We first develop a vehicle detection architecture based on ResNet18 that can more effectively detect vehicles at a full frame rate by improving the BEV mapping and the loss function of the optimizer. Then, we propose a new three-stage vehicle tracking algorithm. This algorithm enhances the Hungarian algorithm to better match objects detected in consecutive frames, while time–space logicality and trajectory similarity are proposed to address the short-term occlusion problem. Finally, the system is tested on static scenes in the KITTI dataset and the MATLAB/Simulink simulation dataset. The results show that the proposed framework outperforms other methods, with F1-scores of 96.97% and 98.58% for vehicle detection for the KITTI and MATLAB/Simulink datasets, respectively. For vehicle tracking, the MOTA are 88.12% and 90.56%, and the ID-F1 are 95.16% and 96.43%, which are better optimized than the traditional Hungarian algorithm. In particular, it has a significant improvement in calculation speed, which is important for real-time transportation applications.

Detection of pavement diseases is crucial for road maintenance. Traditional methods are costly, time-consuming, and less accurate. This paper introduces an enhanced pavement disease recognition algorithm, MS-YOLOv8, which modifies the YOLOv8 model by incorporating three novel mechanisms to improve detection accuracy and adaptability to varied pavement conditions. The Deformable Large Kernel Attention (DLKA) mechanism adjusts convolution kernels dynamically, adapting to multi-scale targets. The Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) enhances the SPPF feature extractor, boosting multi-scale feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, Multi-Scale Dilated Attention in the network’s neck performs Spatially Weighted Dilated Convolution (SWDA) across different dilatation rates, enhancing background distinction and detection precision. Experimental results show that MS-YOLOv8 increases background classification accuracy by 6%, overall precision by 1.9%, and mAP by 1.4%, with specific disease detection mAP up by 2.9%. Our model maintains comparable detection speeds. This method offers a significant reference for automatic road defect detection.

A light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor can obtain richer and more detailed traffic flow information than traditional traffic detectors, which could be valuable data input for various novel intelligent transportation applications. However, the point cloud generated by LiDAR scanning not only includes road user points but also other surrounding object points. It is necessary to remove the worthless points from the point cloud by using a suitable background filtering algorithm to accelerate the micro-level traffic data extraction. This paper presents a background point filtering algorithm using a slice-based projection filtering (SPF) method. First, a 3-D point cloud is projected to 2-D polar coordinates to reduce the point data dimensions and improve the processing efficiency. Then, the point cloud is classified into four categories in a slice unit: Valuable object points (VOPs), worthless object points (WOPs), abnormal ground points (AGPs), and normal ground points (NGPs). Based on the point cloud classification results, the traffic objects (pedestrians and vehicles) and their surrounding information can be easily identified from an individual frame of the point cloud. We proposed an artificial neuron network (ANN)-based model to improve the adaptability of the algorithm in dealing with the road gradient and LiDAR-employing inclination. The experimental results showed that the algorithm of this paper successfully extracted the valuable points, such as road users and curbstones. Compared to the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm and 3-D density-statistic-filtering (3-D-DSF) algorithm, the proposed algorithm in this paper demonstrated better performance in terms of the run-time and background filtering accuracy.

Road defect detection is a crucial aspect of road maintenance projects, but traditional manual methods are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and lack accuracy. Leveraging deep learning frameworks for object detection offers a promising solution to these challenges. However, the complexity of backgrounds, low resolution, and similarity of cracks make detecting road cracks with high accuracy challenging. To address these issues, a novel road crack detection algorithm, termed Road Defect Detection YOLOv5 (RDD-YOLOv5), was proposed. Firstly, a model was proposed to integrate the transformer structure and explicit vision center to capture the long-distance dependency and aggregate key characteristics. Additionally, the Sigmoid-weighted linear activations in YOLOv5 were replaced with the Gaussian Error Linear Units to enhance the model’s nonlinear fitting capability. To evaluate the algorithm’s performance, a UAV flight platform was constructed, and experimental freebies were provided to boost inspection efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of RDD-YOLOv5, achieving a mean average precision of 91.48%, surpassing the original YOLOv5 by 2.5%. The proposed model proves its ability to accurately identify road cracks, even under challenging and complex traffic backgrounds. This advancement in road crack detection technology has significant implications for improving road maintenance and safety.

Driver behavior is considered one of the most important factors in the genesis of dilemma zones and the safety of driver-vehicle-environment systems. An accurate driver behavior model can improve the traffic signal control efficiency and decrease traffic accidents in signalized intersections. This paper uses a mathematical modeling method to study driver behavior in a dilemma zone based on stochastic model predictive control (SMPC), along with considering the dynamic characteristics of human cognition and execution, aiming to provide a feasible solution for modeling driver behavior more accurately and potentially improving the understanding of driver-vehicle-environment systems in dilemma zones. This paper explores the modeling framework of driver behavior, including the perception module, decision-making module, and operation module. The perception module is proposed to stimulate the ability to perceive uncertainty and select attention in the dilemma zone. An SMPC-based driver control modeling method is proposed to stimulate decision-making behavior in the dilemma zone. The operation module is proposed to stimulate the execution ability of the driver. Finally, CarSim, the well-known vehicle dynamics analysis software package, is used to verify the proposed models of this paper. The simulation results show that the SMPC-based driver behavior model can effectively and accurately reflect the vehicle motion and dynamics under driving in the dilemma zone.

More and more scholars are committed to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) as a roadside sensor to obtain traffic flow data. Filtering and clustering are common methods to extract pedestrians and vehicles from point clouds. This kind of method ignores the impact of environmental information on traffic. The segmentation process is a crucial part of detailed scene understanding, which could be especially helpful for locating, recognizing, and classifying objects in certain scenarios. However, there are few studies on the segmentation of low-channel (16 channels in this paper) roadside 3D LiDAR. This paper presents a novel segmentation (slice-based) method for point clouds of roadside LiDAR. The proposed method can be divided into two parts: the instance segmentation part and semantic segmentation part. The part of the instance segmentation of point cloud is based on the regional growth method, and we proposed a seed point generation method for low-channel LiDAR data. Furthermore, we optimized the instance segmentation effect under occlusion. The part of semantic segmentation of a point cloud is realized by classifying and labeling the objects obtained by instance segmentation. For labeling static objects, we represented and classified a certain object through the related features derived from its slices. For labeling moving objects, we proposed a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based model, of which the accuracy could be up to 98.7%. The result implies that the slice-based method can obtain a good segmentation effect and the slice has good potential for point cloud segmentation.

Short-term traffic flow prediction is one of the most important issues in the field of intelligent transport system (ITS). Because of the uncertainty and nonlinearity, short-term traffic flow prediction is a challenging task. In order to improve the accuracy of short-time traffic flow prediction, a hybrid model (SSA-KELM) is proposed based on singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and kernel extreme learning machine (KELM). SSA is used to filter out the noise of traffic flow time series. Then, the filtered traffic flow data is used to train KELM model, the optimal input form of the proposed model is determined by phase space reconstruction, and parameters of the model are optimized by gravitational search algorithm (GSA). Finally, case validation is carried out using the measured data of an expressway in Xiamen, China. And the SSA-KELM model is compared with several well-known prediction models, including support vector machine, extreme learning machine, and single KLEM model. The experimental results demonstrate that performance of the proposed model is superior to that of the comparison models. Apart from accuracy improvement, the proposed model is more robust.

Object detection is the fundamental task of vision-based sensors in environmental perception and sensing. To leverage the full potential of roadside 4D MMW radars, an innovative traffic detection method is proposed based on their distinctive data characteristics. First, velocity-based filtering and region of interest (ROI) extraction were employed to filter and associate point data by merging the point cloud frames to enhance the point relationship. Then, the Louvain algorithm was used to divide the graph into modularity by converting the point cloud data into graph structure and amplifying the differences with the Gaussian kernel function. Finally, a detection augmentation method is introduced to address the problems of over-clustering and under-clustering based on the object ID characteristics of 4D MMW radar data. The experimental results showed that the proposed method obtained the highest average precision and F1 score: 98.15% and 98.58%, respectively. In addition, the proposed method showcased the lowest over-clustering and under-clustering errors in various traffic scenarios compared with the other detection methods.

Crashes among young and inexperienced drives are a major safety problem in the United States, especially in an area with large rural road networks, such as West Texas. Rural roads present many unique safety concerns that are not fully explored. This study presents a complete machine leaning pipeline to find the patterns of crashes involved with teen drivers no older than 20 on rural roads in West Texas, identify factors that affect injury levels, and build four machine learning predictive models on crash severity. The analysis indicates that the major causes of teen driver crashes in West Texas are teen drivers who failed to control speed or travel at an unsafe speed when they merged from rural roads to highways or approached intersections. They also failed to yield on the undivided roads with four or more lanes, leading to serious injuries. Road class, speed limit, and the first harmful event are the top three factors affecting crash severity. The predictive machine learning model, based on Label Encoder and XGBoost, seems the best option when considering both accuracy and computational cost. The results of this work should be useful to improve rural teen driver traffic safety in West Texas and other rural areas with similar issues.