Composite street shadows for vehicles

Abstract

A vehicle information system maintains a street shadow representing attributes of an environment in which a vehicle is located or travels through. The attributes may include objects or events in the surrounding environment. In some embodiments, cloud-based computing devices maintain a primary street shadow, and roadside resources maintain information about short-lived objects or events that may be added to the primary street shadow to augment it. Additionally, a vehicle may further augment the street shadow representation with locally detected events and/or objects. Also, events and objects detected by a vehicle are provided to the roadside resource. The roadside resource may infer an estimated lifetime of the events and objects, and cache short-lived events and objects for distribution to other vehicles, and also provide long-lived events and objects to the cloud-computing devices for use in updating the primary street shadow.