Multi-vehicle cooperative perception and augmented reality for driver assistance: A possibility to ‘see’ through front vehicle

A typical scenario where a front vehicle (the first vehicle) occludes the view of another vehicle (the second vehicle) is often encountered in traffic environment and can be potentially dangerous. For enhancing traffic safety in this scenario, multi-vehicle cooperative perception between the two vehicles is useful. Besides, better visualization of the cooperative perception result might be needed for driver assistance. Based on these motivations, a method of multi-vehicle cooperative perception which realizes an effect of augmented reality is proposed in this paper; the effect of augmented reality here means a direct and natural visualization of the occluded environment for the second vehicle, as if a person at the second vehicle can see through the front vehicle and directly perceive the environment occluded. The proposed cooperative perception method can be used for applications of completely automated mode while the effect of augmented reality would also be convenient for driver assistance. Theoretical and technical details of the proposed method are described; field tests results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.