Content adaptive video compression for autonomous vehicle remote driving

Abstract

It is anticipated that in some extreme situations, autonomous cars will benefit from the intervention of a ״Remote Driver״. The vehicle computer may discover a failure and decide to request remote assistance for safe roadside parking. In a more extreme scenario, the vehicle may require a complete remote-driver takeover due to malfunctions or an inability to resolve unknown decision logic. In such cases, the remote driver will need a sufficiently good quality real-time video stream of the vehicle cameras to respond quickly and accurately enough to the situation at hand. Relaying such a video stream to the remote Command and Control (C&C) center is especially challenging when considering the varying wireless channel bandwidths expected in these scenarios. This paper proposes an innovative end-to-end content-sensitive video compression scheme to allow efficient and satisfactory video transmission from autonomous vehicles to the remote C&C center.