AICP: Augmented Informative Cooperative Perception

TL;DR

AICP is a fast-filtering cooperative perception system for connected vehicles that optimizes shared data relevance, reducing network load and enhancing driver situational awareness through efficient data selection and presentation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fast-filtering mechanism with a custom data structure and sorting algorithm to select the most informative data for vehicle perception systems.

Findings

Adds only 12.6 ms latency in prototype implementation

Effectively filters less relevant data packets

Reduces channel busy time in network performance tests

Abstract

Connected vehicles, whether equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems or fully autonomous, require human driver supervision and are currently constrained to visual information in their line-of-sight. A cooperative perception system among vehicles increases their situational awareness by extending their perception range. Existing solutions focus on improving perspective transformation and fast information collection. However, such solutions fail to filter out large amounts of less relevant data and thus impose significant network and computation load. Moreover, presenting all this less relevant data can overwhelm the driver and thus actually hinder them. To address such issues, we present Augmented Informative Cooperative Perception (AICP), the first fast-filtering system which optimizes the informativeness of shared data at vehicles to improve the fused presentation. To this end, an informativeness maximization problem is presented for vehicles to select a subset of data to display to their drivers. Specifically, we propose (i) a dedicated system design with custom data structure and lightweight routing protocol for convenient data encapsulation, fast interpretation and transmission, and (ii) a comprehensive problem formulation and efficient fitness-based sorting algorithm to select the most valuable data to display at the application layer. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of AICP with a bandwidth-hungry, latency-constrained real-life augmented reality application. The prototype adds only 12.6 milliseconds of latency to a current informativeness-unaware system. Next, we test the networking performance of AICP at scale and show that ACIP effectively filters out less relevant packets and decreases the channel busy time.