Edge Compression: An Integrated Framework for Compressive Imaging Processing on CAVs

Machine vision is the key to the successful deployment of many Advanced Driver Assistant System (ADAS) / Automated Driving System (ADS) functions, which require accurate high-resolution video processing in a real-time manner. Conventional approaches are either to reduce the frame rate or reduce the related frame size of the conventional camera videos, which lead to undesired consequences such as losing informative high-speed information and/or small objects in the video frames.Unlike conventional cameras, Compressive Imaging (CI) cameras are the promising implications of Compressive Sensing, which is an emerging field with the revelation that the optical domain compressed signal (a small number of linear projections of the original video image data) contains sufficient high-speed information for reconstruction and processing. Yet, CI cameras usually need complicated algorithms to retrieve the desired signal, leading to the corresponding high energy consumption. In this paper, we take a step further to the real applications of CI cameras in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), with the primary goal of accelerating accurate video analysis and decreasing energy consumption. We propose a novel Vehicle Edge Server-Cloud closed-loop framework called Edge Compression for CI processing on CAVs. Our comprehensive experiments with four public datasets demonstrate that the detection accuracy of the compressed video images (named measurements) generated by the CI camera is close to the accuracy on reconstructed videos and comparable to the true value, which paves the way of applying CI in CAVs. Finally, six important observations with supporting evidence and analysis are presented to provide practical implications for researchers and domain experts. The code to reproduce our results is available at https://www.thecarlab.oryoutcomes/software.