Points Registration for Roadside LiDAR Sensors

Roadside LiDAR deployment provides a solution to obtain the real-time high-resolution micro traffic data of unconnected road users for the connected-vehicle road network. Single roadside LiDAR sensor has a lot of limitations considering the scant coverage and the difficulty of handling object occlusion issue. Multiple roadside LiDAR sensors can provide a larger coverage and eliminate the object occlusion issue. To combine different LiDAR sensors, it is necessary to integrate the point clouds into the same coordinate system. The existing points registration methods serving mapping scans or autonomous sensing systems could not be directly used for roadside LiDAR sensors considering the different feature of point clouds and the spare points in the cost-effective roadside LiDAR sensors. This paper developed an approach for roadside LiDAR points registration. The developed points-aggregation-based partial iterative closest point algorithm (PA-PICP) is a semi-automatic points registration method, which contains two major parts: XY data registration and Z adjustment. A semi-automatic key point selection method was introduced. The partial iterative closest point was applied to minimize the difference between different LiDARs in the XY plane. The intersection of ground surface between different LiDARs was used for Z-axis adjustment. The performance of the developed procedure was evaluated with field-collected LiDAR data. The results showed the effectiveness and accuracy of data integration using PA-PICP was greatly improved compared with points registration using the traditional iterative closest point. The case studies also showed that the occlusion issue can be fixed after PA-PICP points registration.