An ITS solution providing real-time visual overtaking assistance using smartphones

ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers despite the interest shown by both consumers and industry. Our goal is to develop ITS applications using already available technologies to make them affordable, quick to deploy, and easy to adopt. In this paper we introduce an ITS system for overtaking assistance that provides drivers with a real-time video feed from the vehicle located just in front. This provides a better view of the road ahead, and of any vehicles travelling in the opposite direction, being especially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles. We evaluated our application using H.264 and MJPEG video encoding formats, and determined the most effective codec choice for our case. Experimental results allow us to be optimistic about the effectiveness and applicability of smartphones in providing overtaking assistance based on video streaming in vehicular networks.