Top > Webmaster > 2006 > January > 2006-01-16

Saving the Lives of Europes Pedestrians

When you are walking down the street the last thing that you want to consider is the scary fact that someone may hit you with their car. Crossing the street should not be a life or death situation, but sometimes this does become the case. Preventing pedestrian death has become important for countries all over the world, specifically in the European Union. Every year in the EU there are more than 9,000 deaths and 200,000 injured victims in road accidents in which pedestrians and cyclists collide with a car. Hoping to improve on these grim statistics, is a cutting-edge sensing system that could ultimately help to save the lives of vulnerable road users (VRUs).

The concept is relatively straightforward, SAVE-U combines sensors such as radar, vision and infrared camera, as well as sensor fusion and actuators to increase safety for pedestrians. The main idea is that the sensors will recognize pedestrians and if a pedestrian has a high probability to collide with the vehicle then automatic braking will be initiated by the system. The project set out to develop an innovative pre-impact sensing platform that operates three different technologies of sensors simultaneously, and then fuses their data to protect cyclists and pedestrians under different weather and light conditions. The system comprises a radar network composed of several 24 GHz sensors working in parallel and an imaging system composed of passive infrared and color video cameras.

A prototype vehicle incorporating the new system has been successfully tested in the United Kingdom. Installed on the car are two cameras, one video and one infrared, as well as the radar device. The system calculates in a matter of seconds the movement of pedestrians within the ?capture zone?, which can be anything up to 30 meters away from the vehicle. From that point on, the car?s onboard cameras tracks the pedestrians? movements and this information is correlated with data received from the radar network, such as distance to objects and their speed. SAVE-U can thus identify any pedestrian or cyclist coming within the trajectory of the vehicle and after analyzing the situation, warn the driver or apply automatic braking if there is a risk of collision.