There are many systems designed to help car drivers and to improve safety. In this article, New Scientist focuses on a system developed by National ICT Australia (NICTA). This new driver assistance system uses three cameras, one to look at road signs ahead and two to check what the driver is looking at. The images are transmitted to a computer which decodes the road signs and the driver's reactions to them. If you're driving above speed limits, you will be alerted. Same thing if you're about to pass a stop sign without reducing speed. You still can choose to ignore the warnings, but if you're caught speeding, you'll have to tell the police officer why you refused to slow down. This system is currently being tested and appears to perform well especially in poor lighting conditions. Read more....
Here are the opening paragraphs of the New Scientist article.
The plaintive plea to the traffic cop is the same the world over: "Sorry officer, I didn’t know I was speeding." But drivers may soon have to come up with a better excuse. A new electronic driver’s assistant will detect road signs and warn drivers not to ignore them.
The Australian invention is part of a global effort to make drivers more aware of road signs, especially those concerned with safety. Eventually, GPS-based systems could entirely replace road signs, but until then, ideas like the new driver assistance system (DAS) developed at the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) lab in Canberra may help.
DAS uses three cameras: one to scan the road ahead and a pair to monitor where the driver is looking. The road camera is mounted on the rear view mirror and a "gaze monitoring" pair are set on either side of the instrument panel on the dashboard.
Images from the cameras are fed to a computer system fitted behind the dash. Software on the PC detects road signs and works out where the driver is looking. The speedometer is also connected to the computer, so the system always knows how fast the car is travelling.
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Here is "a typical road scene image taken from a driving sequence from a Smart Car camera. The inset images show the sign cue image (circle detector) and the automatically detected speed sign." (Credit: NICTA, Australia) |
For more information about this project, you should visit this page about Smart Cars at NITCA.
As I mentioned above, there are plenty of other driver assistance systems. For example, try this research on Google. It will return you more than 900 results. Here are some details about one project in Japan.
The two images above show road signs in Japan. Speed signs -- on the left -- are identified by matching stored template images, while other direction signs -- on the right -- are identified by first extracting characters and then by reading characters by template matching. (Credit: Jun Miura, Osaka University, Japan)
You'll find more explanations about this project by visiting this page about the "Vision-Based Driver Assistance System."
Sources: Duncan Graham-Rowe, New Scientist, September 30, 2004; and various other websites
7:12:53 PM
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