Abstract
ABSTRACT – When changing lanes and merging, the distance to other vehicles must be judged accurately. This paper presents a novel rear vision system that uses a camera and a LCD monitor to assist drivers with those maneuvers and judgments by showing the complete rear situation in one image. This is achieved by a novel transformation of an image from a fisheye camera with a 180-degree field of view. The resulting image provides for viewing sizes similar to conventional door mirrors, minimizes blindspots, and is free of unwanted distortions. As a first step in system validation, the system was tested during lane changes while driving and in an experiment in which seven drivers compared the distance of a vehicle seen behind them to a lead vehicle (while parked). Despite having the widest field of view of the compared systems, distance judgements were as accurate (22% relative error) as with door mirrors (23%). In both cases, rear vehicles appeared to be closer than their real distance, whereas conventional rear cameras made them appear farther away than in reality (by 30%). The results confirmed the potential of the proposed system to achieve accurate situation awareness.
KEYWORDS – Driver Assistance, Camera, Image Processing, Distance Perception, Rearview Mirror