New car camera detects pedestrians 100 times faster

Today, driver assistance systems can already warn drivers of obstacles or initiate emergency braking. However, these systems are not yet fast and reliable enough.

“They need to be significantly improved if they are to be used in autonomous vehicles where there is no human behind the wheel,”

says Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich. 

Together with his colleague Daniel Gehrig, he has developed a new system that the two describe as a major breakthrough.

According to the researcher, conventional systems work with standard cameras that take 30 photos per second. In other words, a picture every 33 milliseconds. In order to reliably detect a pedestrian or a car and initiate a braking maneuver, these cameras require at least three images, which brings the total time until the braking maneuver begins to 100 milliseconds.

How the camera works

One way to improve this would be to use a high-speed camera that shoots significantly more images per second. However, these require enormous computing power. The researchers therefore relied on so-called event cameras. Just like the human eye, these cameras pay attention to things that change quickly and only take a photo when something suddenly moves. However, they do not reliably register slow movements.

This is where the new technology comes in: The researchers combined a camera that captures 20 images every second with an event camera and artificial intelligence (AI). The AI was trained to recognize certain obstacles such as other cars or pedestrians in the images from the first camera. Another AI system analyzes the data from the event camera. The data from the event camera is used to predict what the conventional camera will see.

However, it could be many years before the new camera is actually used in road traffic.