Matching 5G Connected Vehicles to Sensed Vehicles for Safe Cooperative Autonomous Driving

5G connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) help enhance perception of driving environment and cooperation among vehicles by sharing sensing and driving information, which is a promising technology to avoid accidents and improve road-use efficiency. A key issue for cooperation among CAVs is matching communicating vehicles to those captured in sensors such as cameras, LiDAR, etc.. Incorrect vehicle matching may cause serious accidents. While centimeter level positioning is now available for autonomous vehicles, matching connected vehicles to sensed vehicles (MCSV) is still challenging and has rarely been studied. In this paper, we are motivated to investigate the MCSV problem for 5G CAVs, propose and assess solutions for the problem to bridge the research gap. We formulate the MCSV problem and propose two MCSV approaches to support cooperative driving. The first approach is based on vehicle registration number (VRN), which is unique to identify a vehicle and can be shared among CAVs for MCSV. VRN is hashed before sharing to protect privacy, and will be compared to the shared one for vehicle matching. The second MCSV approach is based on visual features of vehicle’s external views, which are shared with other CAVs and compared to those obtained from visual sensors to match the vehicles of interest. A new MCSV dataset is developed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Experiment results show that both approaches are feasible and useful, and they achieve a very low false positive rate, which is critical for cooperative driving safety.