Intelligent Headlights

Series of four large projects with Volkswagen AG on head-light lamps control with auto-calibration. During nighttime high beams are sparsely used by drivers even when required by the traffic situation. Thus, the intelligent automatic control of vehicles’ headlight is of great relevance. Since dazzling other drivers must be avoided, detection of oncoming and preceding vehicles is required. The detection must reach such a long distance that only camera based approaches are reliable. In this case, to detect a vehicle means identifying its head or tail lights. The main challenge is to distinguish these lights from reflections due to infrastructure elements. In order to confront such a challenge we have developed a nighttime vehicle detection system whose core is a novel classifier–based module which can label each detected target as vehicle or non–vehicle. However, in general it is unrealistic to assume a classifier, or a set of them, providing the perfect detection rate and no false alarms. Therefore, we propose to explore the temporal coherence of the targets classification. The system works in nighttime under wet and dry conditions.

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