Automatic Real-Time Queue Length Detection Method of Multiple Lanes at Intersections Based on Roadside LiDAR

Signal intersections are key nodes in urban road traffic networks, and real-time queue length information serves as a core performance indicator for formulating effective signal management schemes in modern adaptive traffic signal control systems, thereby enhancing traffic efficiency. In this study, a roadside Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor is employed to acquire 3D point cloud data of vehicles in the road space, which acts as an important method for queue length detection. However, during queue-length detection, vehicles in different lanes are prone to occlusion because of the straight-line propagation of laser beams. This paper proposes a queue-length detection method based on variations in vehicle point cloud features to address the occlusion of queue-end vehicles during detection. This method first preprocesses LiDAR point cloud data (including region-of-interest extraction, ground-point filtering, point cloud clustering, object association, and lane recognition) to detect real-time queue lengths across multiple lanes. Subsequently, the occlusion problem is categorized into complete occulusion and partial occlusion, and corresponding processing is performed to correct the detection results. The performance of the proposed queue length detection method was validated through experiments that collected real-world data from three urban road intersections in Suzhou. The results indicate that this method’s average accuracy can reach 99.3%. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed occlusion handling method has been validated through experiments.