NEW SOURCE OF GEOSPATIAL DATA: CROWDSENSING BY ASSISTED AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract

The ongoing proliferation of remote sensing technologies in the consumer market has been rapidly reshaping the geospatial data acquisition world, and subsequently, the data processing as well as information dissemination processes. Smartphones have clearly established themselves as the primary crowdsourced data generators recently, and provide an incredible volume of remote sensed data with fairly good georeferencing. Besides the potential to map the environment of the smartphone users, they provide information to monitor the dynamic content of the object space. For example, real-time traffic monitoring is one of the most known and widely used real-time crowdsensed application, where the smartphones in vehicles jointly contribute to an unprecedentedly accurate traffic flow estimation. Now we are witnessing another milestone to happen, as driverless vehicle technologies will become another major source of crowdsensed data. Due to safety concerns, the requirements for sensing are higher, as the vehicles should sense other vehicles and the road infrastructure under any condition, not just daylight in favorable weather conditions, and at very fast speed. Furthermore, the sensing is based on using redundant and complementary sensor streams to achieve a robust object space reconstruction, needed to avoid collisions and maintain normal travel patterns. At this point, the remote sensed data in assisted and autonomous vehicles are discarded, or partially recorded for R&D purposes. However, in the long run, as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies mature, recording data will become a common place, and will provide an excellent source of geospatial information for road mapping, traffic monitoring, etc. This paper reviews the key characteristics of crowdsourced vehicle data based on experimental data, and then the processing aspects, including the Data Science and Deep Learning components.