Vehicle to Pedestrian Systems: Survey, Challenges and Recent Trends

The accelerated rise of new technologies has reshaped the manufacturing industry of contemporary vehicles. Numerous technologies and applications have completely revolutionized the driving experience in terms of both safety and convenience. Although vehicles are now connected and equipped with a multitude of sensors and radars for collision avoidance, millions of people suffer serious accidents on the road, and unfortunately, the death rate is still on the rise. Collisions are still a dire reality for vehicles and pedestrians alike, which is why the improvement of collision prevention mechanisms is an ongoing necessity. Collision prevention mechanisms have evolved from vision-based systems like radars to systems that transcend the driver’s line of sight. These latter systems depend on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to employ bidirectional communication between vehicles and other vehicles (V2V) as well as between vehicles and road infrastructure (V2I). Recently, research has expanded to include a new communication system between vehicles and pedestrians (V2P) through the latter’s smartphones. In this paper, we provide an extensive survey of existing V2P projects, categorize different parameters that influence V2P system design, compare different communication technologies used in V2P systems and present an overview of recent trends that solve problems in V2P systems like network congestion, pedestrian localization, and context information exchange. The main contribution of our work is to pave the road for future research by providing a comprehensive view of projects, challenges and recent trends in the emerging and rapidly growing field of V2P system design.