Measuring Roadway Lane Widths Using Connected Vehicle Sensor Data

The United States has over three trillion vehicle miles of travel annually on over four million miles of public roadways, which require regular maintenance. To maintain and improve these facilities, agencies often temporarily close lanes, reconfigure lane geometry, or completely close the road depending on the scope of the construction project. Lane widths of less than 11 feet in construction zones can impact highway capacity and crash rates. Crash data can be used to identify locations where the road geometry could be improved. However, this is a manual process that does not scale well. This paper describes findings for using data from onboard sensors in production vehicles for measuring lane widths. Over 200 miles of roadway on US-52, US-41, and I-65 in Indiana were measured using vehicle sensor data and compared with mobile LiDAR point clouds as ground truth and had a root mean square error of approximately 0.24 feet. The novelty of these results is that vehicle sensors can identify when work zones use lane widths substantially narrower than the 11 foot standard at a network level and can be used to aid in the inspection and verification of construction specification conformity. This information would contribute to the construction inspection performed by agencies in a safer, more efficient way.

Application of Radar Solutions for the Purpose of Bird Tracking Systems Based on Video Observation

Wildlife Hazard Management is nowadays a very serious problem, mostly at airports and wind farms. If ignored, it may lead to repercussions in human safety, ecology, and economics. One of the approaches that is widely implemented in small and medium-size airports, as well as on wind turbines is based on a stereo-vision. However, to provide long-term observations allowing the determination of the hot spots of birds’ activity and forecast future events, a robust tracking algorithm is required. The aim of this paper is to review tracking algorithms widely used in Radar Science and assess the possibilities of application of these algorithms for the purpose of tracking birds with a stereo-vision system. We performed a survey-of-related works and simulations determined five state-of-the art algorithms: Kalman Filter, Nearest-Neighbour, Joint-Probabilistic Data Association, and Interacting Multiple Model with the potential for implementation in a stereo-vision system. These algorithms have been implemented and simulated in the proposed case study