News summary:
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996454
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A new electronic driver's assistant will detect road signs and warn drivers not to ignore them.
- 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.
- 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.
- The software scans the video pictures and detects road signs by recognising their symmetrical shapes: rectangles, diamonds, octagons or circles.
- The computer uses a commercial package called FaceLab to analyse images from the stereoscopic cameras and work out where the driver is looking.
- If the driver appears not to have seen a sign, and the car's speed does not change, an alert is issued, says Nick Barnes, one of the developers at NICTA.
- NICTA's team will tell the International Conference on Intelligent Robotic Systems in Sendai, Japan, this week that in preliminary tests DAS performed "pretty well" even at high speeds.
- Former NICTA team member Gareth Loy, who is now at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, says sign detection is a tough engineering problem.
- NICTA's "symmetry seeker" makes detection easier in a cluttered scene regardless of the lighting, he claims.
- However, there is a danger that sign detection could become annoying, warns Andrew Howard, head of road safety for the UK's Automobile Association, especially on routes where the driver is familiar with the signs.
- Though Barnes says this will take many years, some campaigners cannot wait to see the end of road signs.
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