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. Therefore, we introduce EdgeSharing, a localization and object sharing system leveraging the resources of edge cloud platforms. EdgeSharing holds a real-time 3D feature map of its coverage region 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 0.28-1.27 meters, an object sharing accuracy of 82.3%-91.4%, and a 54.7% object awareness increment in urban streets and intersections. In addition, the proposed optimization techniques reduce bandwidth consumption by 70.12% and end-to-end latency by 40.09%.