Honda may build tiny cameras into its cars’ wing mirrors, reports New Scientist.
These “car cams” would look at the road both ahead and behind and use cellphone connections to send real time video back to a central server. Each car would also transmit its GPS location and speed, allowing the central server to build a collection of road views and traffic information, integrated into a digital map of the area. Honda envisages a free access scheme, allowing any participating driver to use a home computer or an in-car navigation device to click on a map and view real-time road conditions and details of car speeds. Fixed cameras by the roadside could supplement the data.
For privacy, Honda suggests that all video footage would be supplied anonymously, and that all cameras would automatically switch off whenever the GPS device detects that it is close to the driver’s home or office.
New CMOS imager chips are emerging that directly sense depth—3D pixel-by-pixel, says EE Times today.
Current automotive systems calculate distance, such as those that warn drivers of obstacle behind them as they back up, by using ultrasonic sensors. More sophisticated—expensive—sensors are under development using radar and lidar, but companies worldwide are trying to find cheaper ways to use cameras to calculate distance.
“Cameras are becoming so inexpensive that everybody in the business is trying to use them instead of more expensive ultrasonic, lidar and radar sensors,” said David Alexander, senior analyst at ABI Research.
“We already have 2D cameras which are used to provide lane-departure warnings—the camera looks out the front and tracks the dotted line. A new application might be pre-crash sensing that calculates that a crash is imminent and pre-charged the brakes as well as fires the air bags more quickly than when waiting for the crash to happen.”
One of the most promising approaches has been honed by Canesta (above). Canesta’s CMOS image chip (below), detects the distance to every object in a scene simultaneously, as opposed to ultrasonic which only senses distance to the nearest objects”, said Alexander.
“One of the things that distinguishes Canesta is its Sunshield technology that solves one of the hardest problems of using a camera—that is it must be able to work in varying light situations to be safe enough to deploy in consumer automobiles… but they still have a ways to go to crack all these different automotive applications. I believe that it will be the 2008 and 2009 models in which we will see the first Canesta’s 3D camera in consumer vehicles.”
Other companies are also experimenting with making CMOS image chips that detect depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis, notably International Electronics & Engineering (Luxemburg, Germany). Another company, Mobileye (Southfield, Mich.), using a normal 2D camera with their CMOS hardware accelerator chip.
