Lidar Data Analysis for Time to Headway Determination in the DriveSafe Project Field Tests

The DriveSafe project was carried out by a consortium of university research centers and automotive OEMs in Turkey to reduce accidents caused by driver behavior. A huge amount of driving data was collected from 108 drivers who drove the instrumented DriveSafe vehicle in the same route of 25 km of urban and highway traffic in Istanbul. One of the sensors used in the DriveSafe vehicle was a forward-looking LIDAR. The data from the LIDAR is used here to determine and record the headway time characteristics of different drivers. This paper concentrates on the analysis of LIDAR data from the DriveSafe vehicle. A simple algorithm that only looks at the forward direction along a straight line is used first. Headway times based on this simple approach are presented for an example driver. A more accurate detection and tracking algorithm taken from the literature are presented later in the paper. Grid-based and point distance-based methods are presented first. Then, a detection and tracking algorithm based on the Kalman filter is presented. The results are demonstrated using experimental data.