Methods and systems for augmented reality in automotive applications

A system for augmented reality in automotive applications, the system comprising:

• an environment interpretation engine that identifies at least one environmental object in an image frame obtained from a camera of a motor vehicle;
• a developer kit that provides an interface for facilitating development of the automotive applications by third parties, wherein:
• when one of the automotive applications is selected for execution on the system, the developer kit is configured to:
• provide the at least one identification of an environmental object to a content augmentation engine of the selected automotive application, the content augmentation engine configured to determine an augmentation content based on the at least one identification of the environmental object;
• and
• a rendering engine that renders an augmented image frame based on the image frame and the augmentation content received from the selected automotive application via the developer kit for display of the augmented image to a user, and
• wherein, as part of the at least one identification of the at least one environmental object in the image frame, the environment interpretation engine is further configured to:
• process the image frame using machine learning-based image processing previously trained on traffic environment image data, and
• for an instance of one of the at least one environmental object, merge disjoint blobs associated with the instance,
• wherein merging the disjoint blobs comprises performing dilation operations and erosion operations on the disjoint blobs.

A non-transitory computer readable medium (CRM) storing computer readable program code for augmented reality in automotive applications, wherein the computer readable program code causes a computer system to:

• obtain an image frame from a camera of a motor vehicle;
• identify at least one environmental object in the image frame;
• for one of the automotive applications selected for execution:
• provide, by a developer kit, the at least one identification of an environmental object to a content augmentation engine of the selected automotive application, the content augmentation engine configured to determine an augmentation content based on the at least one identification of the environmental object;
• render an augmented image frame based on the image frame and the augmentation content received from the selected automotive application via the developer kit;
• and
• display the augmented image frame to a user,
• wherein the developer kit provides an interface for facilitating development of the automotive applications by third parties, and
• wherein the at least one identification of the at least one environmental object in the image frame comprises further causing the computer system to:
• process the image frame using machine learning-based image processing previously trained on traffic environment image data, and
• for an instance of one of the at least one environmental object, merge disjoint blobs associated with the instance,
• wherein merging the disjoint blobs comprises performing dilation operations and erosion operations on the disjoint blobs.