Lane-Level Vehicle Counting Based on V2X and Centimeter-level Positioning at Urban Intersections

Accurate vehicles counting for all-weather in cities are an important part of traffic management in the application of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Vehicle counting is currently collected with computer vision and sensor network methods. However, these methods require expensive hardware to achieve real-time and anti-interference capability, and do not provide lane-level vehicle information for ITS traffic management. This paper presents a lane-level vehicle counting system that is based on V2X communications and centimeter-level positioning technologies. This system can be used to traffic survey of ITS at a range of urban intersections. For realizing lane-level counting, a lane determination method is designed with on-board units (OBUs) in this paper. The lane is identified by matching the vehicle positioning information with road information from the roadside unit (RSU). The RSU collects the vehicle counting information from OBUs in different instances. The counting information includes the vehicle location data, the vehicle status data, and the vehicle number of each lane in the range of intersections. Verification and analysis were performed by a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform. The results showed an average vehicle counting accuracy rate (99.60%). The system enabled the collection of real-time statistics with low-power consumption and low latency, providing accurate data to ITS.