The Role of Vision Sensors in Future Intelligent Vehicles

The advancement in CMOS imaging sensors has enabled low-cost and high quality cameras that are making their way into future automobiles. Vision sensors can be deployed in a car to perform a variety of functions, including driver monitoring for workload management; passenger monitoring for intelligent airbag deployment; pedestrian and object recognition for precrash sensing; lane marker and roadway tracking for lane/roadway departure warnings; and general scene and object recognition to improve ACC/FCW/CA (adaptive cruise control / forward collision warning / collision avoidance) system robustness through sensor fusion. Possible system implementation and key performance requirements for vision sensors in these applications are discussed.