Bringing Different Views Together: A Hybrid Cooperative Perception Framework for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Cooperative perception will be essential for connected autonomous vehicles to enhance object recognition and optimize path planning by sending data information about the surrounding environment. However, an inherent challenge in existing systems is the high bandwidth cost of transmitting information in real-time, which restricts cooperative perception’s practicality. This work presents a hybrid cooperative perception fusion framework aimed at mitigating this issue by optimizing data transmission according to available bandwidth or through data reduction techniques. Our methods ensure that vehicles can rapidly transmit high-confidence data without overwhelming the network. Experimental results indicate that our methodology substantially diminishes data transmission sizes while maintaining object detection accuracy. For cooperative perception in autonomous vehicle systems, our approach provides a scalable and effective way to get past the bandwidth barrier.