EdgeSharing: Edge Assisted Real-time Localization and Object Sharing in Urban Streets
Abstract
Collaborative object localization and sharing at smart intersections promises to improve situational awareness of traffic participants in key areas where hazards exist due to visual obstructions. By sharing a moving object's location between different camera-equipped devices, it effectively extends the vision of traffic participants beyond their field of view. However, accurately sharing objects between moving clients is extremely challenging due to the high accuracy requirements for localizing both the client position and positions of its detected objects. Existing approaches based on direct sharing between devices are limited by the computational resources of (potentially legacy) vehicles and bad flexibility. To address these challenges, we introduce EdgeSharing, a novel localization and object sharing system leveraging the resources of edge cloud platforms. EdgeSharing holds a real-time 3D feature map of its coverage region on the edge cloud and uses it to provide accurate localization and object sharing service to the client devices passing through this region. We further propose several optimization techniques to increase the localization accuracy, reduce the bandwidth consumption and decrease the offloading latency of the system. The result shows that the system is able to achieve a mean vehicle localization error of 0.2813-1.2717 meters, an object sharing accuracy of 82.3\%-91.44\%, and a 54.68\% object awareness increment in urban streets and intersections. In addition, the proposed optimization techniques are able to reduce 70.12\% of bandwidth consumption and reduce 40.09\% of the end-to-end latency.