Visual Sensor Fusion and Data Sharing across Connected Vehicles for Active Safety

By exchanging basic traffic messages among vehicles for safety applications, a significantly higher level of safety can be achieved when vehicles and designated infrastructure-locations share their sensor data. While cameras installed in one vehicle can provide visual information for mitigating many avoidable accidents, a new safety paradigm is envisioned where visual data captured by multiple vehicles are shared and fused for significantly more optimized active safety and driver assistance systems. The sharing of visual data is motivated by the fact that some critical visual views captured by one vehicle or by an infrastructure-location are not visible or captured by other vehicles in the same environment. Sharing such data in real-time provides an invaluable new level of awareness that can significantly enhance a driver-assistance, connected vehicle, and/or autonomous vehicle's safety-system.