Fujitsu boffins build 'god-view' cam rig for drivers
Third-person perspective motoring
Fujitsu has come up with a system that will give motorists a full 360° view around their car, from an almost god-like perspective.
The Fujitsu rig is based on four vehicle-mounted cameras and clever software that stitches the images together into a third-person perspective-like view that allows the driver, it's claimed, "view any perspective and any sightline on the vehicle's periphery".
Fujitsu's Omni-View: see what's happening around you
The company's pitch is that such an "omni-view" system allows the driver to see instantly any hazards that may affect the maneouvre he or she is about to make - park, reverse, change lanes, overtake and so on.
Handy for reversing out of a parking space?
Unlike today's array of rearview and side-mounted mirrors, and blind-spot checks, the driver can see all he or she needs to see with one glance, not three or four.
Existing camera-based visual aids provide a single view which can be hard for the drive to interpret in relation to his or her own view out of the windscreen of the car.
Kerb your enthusiasm
Couple that with image recognition technology and you also have a system capable of pointing out hazards the driver may not have noticed.
Fujitsu didn't say how the driver manipulates his or her virtual vantage point, though it claimed moving from one to another is done smoothly and quickly so there's no sudden change of image, something that could disorient the driver.
It's early days yet for the technology, and more work needs to be done to turn it into a system that could be built into a car. Fujitsu's focus, for instance, is on the process of taking those four images from the car-mounted cameras and turning them into a 3D image, rather than the driver interaction mechanism.
COMMENTS
So it's Inifnity's "Around View Monitor", turned on all the time?
Kind of curious - when infinity introduced their Around View Monitor no one on this side of the atlantic noticed, but when fujitsu (which have no car ties whatsoever) taut a segmented omnicam setup for feature detection, like people in AI faculties the world over have been letting their students in machine vision 101 play with, it's newsworthy?
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/29/infinitis-around-view-monitor-is-watching/
at least that one's already used in a production vehicle.
Driving on acid is easy...
If that's what a God's-eye view looks like, He must have been tripping His nuts off at the time!
Birds eye view
So, how long before the birds perfect their target practice on those cameras? They seem pretty good at getting that bit that's in your line of sight but not covered by the wipers, and I'm sure they do it on purpose!
Imagine the insurance claims: I crashed into that car in the car park because a bird had shat on my camera and I couldn't be bothered to actually look where I was going.
Can they teach it to recognise a stop sign/red light and apply the brakes? How about recognising when the lights turn green and announcing "go you idiot, it's on green. It's been green for 30 bloody seconds, get on with it." (etc)
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