Making Vehicles Transparent Through V2V Video Streaming

The advent of infrastructureless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication has opened the opportunity to design driver-assistance systems that collect information from sensors residing in neighboring vehicles. Windshield-installed cameras are one example of a sensor that is becoming common in modern vehicles. Remotely accessing real-time images of these cameras using V2V communication enables a significant increase in the visual awareness of each driver. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of a driver-assistance system that leverages on V2V communication and windshield-installed cameras to transform vision-obstructing vehicles into transparent tubular objects. This cooperative system is able to increase the visibility of drivers intending to overtake, thus making such critical maneuvers safer. Our system uses an augmented reality human-machine interface that is able to convey the increased visibility perspective in a straightforward fashion. We also show that the required latency for this intervehicle communication can be obtained using the Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) proposed for vehicular environments.