Smart headlights see through rain and snow

[sgt_doofey]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news...rain-and-snow/

A prototype headlight system can detect raindrops or snow streaks and "dis-illuminate" them, thereby increasing visibility on the road ahead.

The system uses a digital projector to illuminate raindrops for several milliseconds while a camera mounted on the side of the projector captures each raindrop's location; software predicts where those raindrops will fall within the driver's field of view. Light rays from the headlight that would normally hit the raindrop are automatically switched off, reducing glare and leaving only the beams of light which travel uninterrupted in between the falling drops.

The system's operating range is three to four meters in front of the projector—the "critical range" at which glare is most distracting, according to tests conducted using a Toyota Prius.

The system was developed by Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Srinivasa Narasimhan, along with several others. Narasimhan presented his findings in a talk at Microsoft Research and at Research@Intel 2012.

The researchers simulated different car speeds and rainfall intensity in the laboratory by varying the speed at which simulated rain streaks—using actual water propagated in front of the projector—shoot past the screen as well as the number of streaks. The system could reliably make rain streaks invisible at low speeds and still increase visibility at higher speeds by dimming some of the rain.

In severe thunderstorm rain, the accuracy is 70 percent at 30 kilometers per hour and 15 to 20 percent at 100 kilometers an hour; that's how much of the rain is removed from view. Because water in a heavy rain is only 2 to 3 percent of the air volume, the rain can be filtered by dimming the headlights by just a few percent.

Substituting the hardware for a bigger and better camera would improve the system but increase its size and cost. However, making the system fast enough to reduce even more rain glare at highway speeds is important, because that's where there's greater risk for a catastrophic crash, says Narasimhan. He believes the experiments to date show that the idea is feasible, but notes that it will be necessary to account for the effects of car movement before the system can be used in the real world.

Kent Larson, who leads the CityCar project at MIT's Media Lab, says the headlight system is another advance toward making vehicles more autonomous. "Eventually it won't matter whether you have your vision obscured," he says. "The car itself will do it."

[Keepleft]

Sgt - If the technology becomes UNECE regulation (global), then we WILL see it adopted here. It'd probably gain various compliance function recognition.

We are seeing the first LED based front fogs now; 'F3' compliance code. Sometimes incorporated with other lamp function like DRL/Cornering.

Regards.

[mik]

i think if the rain is coming down that hard seeing through the windscreen will be a big problem anyway, one thing i`ve noticed between driving trucks and cars in a bucketing down storm is the rake of windscreen makes a big difference to visibility, seeing through a big flat upright windscreen the water runs straight down, bloody magnificent for vision, doing the same in 99% of cars you will be off road waiting for the storm to ease.
this is one area on motor cars where i think fashion /style is for sure in the way of safety.

[BHDOGS]

future the windscreen is actually a projector and the car uses mounted cameras to project whats infront of the car using infra red ect so you get a crystal clear picture even in snow fog or rain now that would be cool