  Autonomous vehicles are expected to operate safely in real-life road
conditions in the next years. Nevertheless, unanticipated events such as the
existence of unexpected objects in the range of the road, can put safety at
risk. The advancement of sensing and communication technologies and Internet of
Things may facilitate the recognition of hazardous situations and information
exchange in a cooperative driving scheme, providing new opportunities for the
increase of collaborative situational awareness. Safe and unobtrusive
visualization of the obtained information may nowadays be enabled through the
adoption of novel Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces in the form of windshields.
Motivated by these technological opportunities, we propose in this work a
saliency-based distributed, cooperative obstacle detection and rendering scheme
for increasing the driver's situational awareness through (i) automated
obstacle detection, (ii) AR visualization and (iii) information sharing
(upcoming potential dangers) with other connected vehicles or road
infrastructure. An extensive evaluation study using a variety of real datasets
for pothole detection showed that the proposed method provides favorable
results and features compared to other recent and relevant approaches.
