Continental’s pedestrian-safety breakthrough

Auto supply giant develops a stereo camera system that recognises pedestrians and crossing traffic

Pedestrians can soon expect to have much longer average lifespans thanks to a new stereo-camera-based safety system developed by German auto supplier Continental (who most people would perhaps associate solely with tyres).

According to stats quoted by the company, accidents involving pedestrians or with vehicles at intersections make up almost half (46.6 percent) of the traffic accidents in Germany that result in major personal injury.

The key to the new system is that the stereo camera has two ‘eyes’, and is therefore able to use the difference in the images within one camera shot to detect every type of obstacle -- from loads that have fallen onto the road to people and animals -- and can determine their size and the distance to them.

Continental says this cannot be done sufficiently reliably with mono-cameras, which also have to be taught to recognise a car games or a motorcycle and which are then only able to identify objects that they have learned.

The stereo camera consists of two high-resolution mono-cameras, housed approximately 20cm apart behind the windshield, and these are capable of measuring the distance to an object and its height from the road surface.

This is made possible by the differences in the perspective between the left-hand and the right-hand optical paths. In other words, the stereo camera's analysing electronics exploit the same effect that gives humans spatial vision -- i.e. the parallax shift between two images.

Continental claims that, at medium distances of 20-30m, the stereo camera can determine the range to the object with an accuracy of between 20cm and 30cm. The system has a range of up to 60m.

The company adds that the system also functions with high accuracy in situations where several objects are in close proximity to each other, where objects are partially obscured, or when there is poor contrast between the object and its background.

The stereo-camera system can allegedly calculate the precise point of impact of a potential collision and make the best possible use of the remaining time to take protective action. If the driver fails to react to what the system detects as a pedestrian, it can initiate emergency braking (up to 1G).

The advantage of this is that a few hundred milliseconds are sufficient for an emergency stop to make the difference between sustaining bruises and suffering far more severe injuries, says Continental.

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