Integration of vehicular network and smartphones to provide real-time visual assistance during overtaking

The Intelligent Transportation Systems area has experienced great developments in the recent past, although suffering from slow adoption ratios thus depriving consumers of many interesting and innovative applications. The only solution to this problem is to develop Intelligent Transportation Systems solutions using the already available technologies that are within the grasp of the common people, to make them cost-effective, quick to deploy and easy to adopt. We have therefore developed an affordable Intelligent Transportation Systems that make use of standard smartphones to assist drivers when overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network among the close-by vehicles and provides drivers with a real-time video feed from the one located just ahead. Our system seamlessly offers a better view of the road, and of any vehicle travelling in the opposite direction, being especially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles. We have validated our overtaking assistance system, in both laboratory environment and realistic scenarios. The laboratory tests involved choosing the most effective video codec between MJPEG and H.264, for providing real-time video streaming. Then, using the chosen codec, we performed the outdoor tests to further tune our application to maximise performance. The preliminary results from our experiments allow being optimistic about the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed system.