Smart Headlights

Drivers can struggle to see when driving at night in a rainstorm or snowstorm. But a smart headlight system invented by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute can improve visibility by constantly redirecting light to shine between particles of precipitation. The system, demonstrated in laboratory tests, prevents the distracting and sometimes dangerous glare that occurs when headlight beams are reflected by precipitation back toward the driver. The system uses a camera to track the motion of raindrops and snowflakes and then applies a computer algorithm to predict where those particles will be just a few milliseconds later. The light projection system then adjusts to deactivate light beams that would otherwise illuminate the particles in their predicted positions.

Transcript

00:00:02 during a rainstorm any light source used to illuminate the scene will also reflect off of nearby raindrops for example the headlights of a car driving at night will not only brighten the road but also brighten the drops causing distracting [Music] flashes in this paper we present a method that uses high-speed adaptive

00:00:23 projection to illuminate the scene but not illuminate the drops this will give the driver better visibility at a time when it is most needed this illustration demonstrates our basic idea the car's headlights illuminate the scene and some light rays intersect drops these illuminated drops will appear as bright flickering distracting

00:00:47 Stakes however if we can determine the Rays that are Illuminating only drops we can momentarily turn them off as the drops are moving quickly each Ray will spend only an imperceptible fraction of a second off giving the driver the impression of headlights that see through rain we capture images with either a stereo camera pair or a collocated

00:01:08 camera projector system once the image is acquired we quickly process the image to detect the particle and predict its future location when we are finally able to update the lighting to not illuminate it using simulation we have investigated the requirements for such a system to be feasible here is a simulation of rain 5 mm per hour with a system latency of 13 milliseconds our adaptive projection

00:01:35 system runs at 120 htz this first example is a simulation with a stationary camera black streaks are the drops successfully not illuminated the red streaks of the top are drops that the system is not yet recognized if we add forward velocity the drops enter the field of view from the top and the sides which makes the

00:01:59 test challenging though not impossible at 30 km per hour the accuracy is 73% at very high speeds our system is still capable of not Illuminating many of the drops while still maintaining High light throughput we have also created a prototype camera projector system that detects drops and adaptively adjusts the

00:02:25 illumination the system consists of a collocated camera and projector both running at one 12 HZ based on the captured images this prototype system adapts the projector lighting every 8 milliseconds this video shows how the system operates on a single drop the camera input is fed into our system which predicts the future location of

00:02:46 the drop and directs the projector to not illuminate it for the predicted location video the color red indicates the parts of the drop that are incorrectly illuminated green indicates the parts of the drop that are correctly not illuminated and blue indicates pixels that were incorrectly turned off this video shows multiple drops released from different drop emitters

00:03:10 the system is able to track and predict the future locations of each drop at 120 Herz shown here are drops falling at 32 drops per second which is equivalent to a severe thunderstorm the drops are falling against the background with varying brightness and contrast levels to simulate time driving on a busy road as can be seen the visibility is

00:03:36 much improved when the illumination is reactively controlled increasing the system Speed and Performance will make adaptive headlights a real possibility making driving an inclement weather safer and less stressful