Realtime wide-area vehicle trajectory tracking using millimeter-wave radar sensors and the open TJRD TS dataset

Abstract

• A system based on millimeter wave radar is introduced for tracking vehicles. • Trajectory splicing is applied for tracking vehicles in wide-area level. • Validation results show a reliable and stable performance of the system. • The system performs well in detecting speeding fractions through pilot project. • TJRD TS Platform is introduced in sharing wide-area trajectory dataset (open). This paper presented a real-time millimeter wave radar-based system for tracking vehicle trajectories in a wide area (continuously along a roadway with essentially no length limit in practice). The trajectory tracking results were first validated for single vehicle trajectory tracking using the Real-Time Kinematic positioning technology based on the Beidou satellite navigation systems. The validation showed that the vehicle positions were captured with a mean lateral offset of −0.284 m and a mean longitudinal offset of −0.352 m. The mean estimated speeds were found to have a difference of only −0.048 km/h from the ground truths. The trajectory tracking results were also validated through multi-object tracking using video data from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Compared with the UAV video footage, the millimeter wave-based system was found to correctly capture around 92% of the total number of vehicles. For the correctly captured vehicles, their positions were found to be within 0.99 m (about a quarter of the width of a regular traffic lane) of the ground truth. In this paper, we also would like to share openly the entire validated datasets which has been recently published online as the TJRD TS platform. Additionally, a demonstration in using the dataset to detect aggressive driving behaviors, such as speeding was presented. It is expected that the open dataset will help enable researchers and practitioners to further explore the behaviors of road users, track the dynamics of safety risks and congestion formation, and evaluate incident impacts in a more microscopic but comprehensive way.