In recent years, various Portable Navigation Devices (PND) such as smart-phones are becoming popular as a vehicle navigation device. To compare with a conventional built-in navigation system, PND has advantages that it is low cost and easily mounted to the vehicle. On the other hand, PND has also disadvantage that in the most case it cannot obtain the reliable vehicle speed information such as wheel pulse information and that induces degradation of vehicle trajectory estimation (dead-reckoning). The vehicle trajectory estimation is the positioning method using inertial sensors, and generally used when GPS is not available. So in urban area where GPS signals are blocked or reflected by tall buildings, the degradation of vehicle trajectory estimation may cause the severe increase of position error. Accordingly, in this study two approaches are proposed to improve vehicle trajectory estimation with PND. The first one is the accurate speed estimation using time-series tightly coupled integration of accelerometer, gyro, and Doppler shift of GPS. And the second one is the correction of trajectory error using backward refinement that can work even in real-time processing. The experimental result in Shinjuku which is dense urban city shows that the error of vehicle trajectory estimation was reduced to 1/4 compared with the previous method.

Providing images captured by an on-board camera to surrounding vehicles is an effective method to achieve smooth road traffic and to avoid traffic accidents. We consider providing images using WiFi technology based on the IEEE802.11p standard for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication media. We want to compress images to suppress communication traffic, because the communication capacity of the V2V system is strictly limited. However, there are difficulties in image compression and transmission using wireless communication especially in a vehicular broadcast environment, due to transmission errors caused by fading, packet collision, etc. In this letter, we propose an image transmission technique based on compressed sensing. Through computer simulations, we show that our proposed technique can achieve stable image reconstruction despite frequent packet error.

For transmission of video signals, it is important that the system allows a certain degree of flexibility in bit rate as well as quality, depending upon the requirements of media and channel conditions. In this paper, we discuss the hierarchical transmission of Huffman code using multi-code/multi-rate DS/SS system to realize flexible transmission. We first discuss and show that the structure of Huffman code tree directly expresses hierarchical structure, and that parallel transmission of Huffman code can achieve hierarchical transmission. By assigning different transmission data rate to the bits in each stratum, it is possible to transmit different amount of information from each stratum. Further, we show the quality of each of the stratum can easily controlled by an appropriate power distribution to each parallel transmission branch.

We propose a novel hierarchical transmission method of DCT coefficients using multi-code DS/SS modulation. For low resolution image transmission over noisy channel, an error resilient and graceful degradation technique is necessary. Here, the DCT coefficients are divided into each stratum (a branch of multi-code DS/SS) and transmitted simultaneously through a noisy channel. By assigning an appropriate transmission energy that corresponds to their source energy variances, energy assignment, it is possible to maintain picture quality effectively even in a noisy channel. Analysis of this method was performed using an image data model, 2-D Gauss-Markov random field, which showed that picture quality is maintained even in the noisy channel condition.