Scalable Radar-based ITS: Self-localization and Occupancy Heat Map for Traffic Analysis

4D mmWave radar sensors are well suited for city scale Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) given their long sensing range, weatherproof functionality, simple mechanical design, and low manufacturing cost. In this paper, we investigate radar-based ITS for scalable traffic analysis. Localization of these radar sensors in a city scale range is a fundamental task in ITS. For mobile ITS setups it requires more endeavor. To address this task, we propose a self-localization approach that matches two descriptions of "road": the one from the geometry of the motion trajectories of cumulatively observed vehicles, and the other one from the aerial laser scan. An ICP (iterative closest point) algorithm is used to register the motion trajectory into the road section of the laser scan to estimate the sensor pose. We evaluates the results and show that it outperforms other map-based radar localization methods, especially for the orientation estimation. Beyond the localization result, we project radar sensor data onto city scale laser scan and generate an scalable occupancy heat map as a traffic analysis tool. This is demonstrated using two radar sensors monitoring an urban area in the real world.