Patent ID: 11961392
Assignee: THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE
Field: Audio-visual technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G  H

Claim 14:
15. A method for monitoring safety of a highway work zone and predicting vehicular intrusion into the highway work zone by vehicles and notifying a user of one or more assisted reality devices in the highway work zone before the vehicular intrusion enters the highway work zone, the method comprising:
positioning an edge device at a boundary between a work zone and a road or in the work zone, the edge device including at least one camera configured to capture images in sequence of the vehicles and one or more processors;
providing the one or more assisted reality devices to the user;
performing vehicle detection of the vehicles, at the edge device, over an input of a data stream of the images via an input of streaming pixels, from the at least one camera, utilizing just-in-time processing to process a real-time feed from the at least one camera to predict a risk-causing event of a vehicular safety threat to the user, the event being the vehicular intrusion by the vehicles into the work zone;
determining a level of safety, at the edge device, by tracking the vehicles detected and performing a time sequence analysis of the vehicles, wherein the images captured from the at least one camera are not stored;
providing real-time alerts of varying levels of audio and visual warnings based on a severity of the vehicular safety threat determined by the edge device, including sending a signal from the edge device to the one or more assisted reality devices of the user in the work zone indicating the level of safety thereto to provide instantaneous feedback to the user in the work zone as soon as the safety threat is detected by the edge device but before the vehicular safety threat enters the work zone to predict the vehicular intrusion into to work zone and notify the user of the one or more assisted reality devices before the vehicular safety threat enters the work zone to provide time for the user to avoid the vehicular safety threat, wherein the varying levels of warnings are based on risk values within a risk scale attuned to detected risk and vary based on a low risk defined as when no vehicle is detected traveling toward the work zone to high risk defined as when the vehicle is moving toward the work zone, and processing employs a real-time deep learning algorithm; and
communicating, from the one or more assisted reality devices, the level of safety to the user; wherein the edge device sends the alerts only to the one or more assisted reality devices and the edge device communicates with the one or more assisted reality devices through a local network established for communication between the edge device and the one or more assisted reality devices without requiring continuous access to the internet.