The increasing requirements on safety and passenger protection systems in the automotiv industry imposes the development of new sensors and microsystems which are able to detect frontal as well as lateral crash conditions. Under the VISTA framework (see ESPRIT VISTA proj. 8867), a new low cost, miniature, optical sensor has been realised which is able to predict crash events starting from the visual stimuli perceived on a custom silicon image sensor. In particular, the microsystem computes in real time (with a frequency of 1000 Hz) the so called Time-To-Crash (TTC): the time needed for an object moving in the field of view to collide with the sensor plane. The operation principle is based on the analysis of the optical flow in the image projected on the sensor, through a novel algorithmic technique, based on sparse sampling a the image and one-dimensional correlation. Based on this sensing principle, a novel generation of air bag systems and seat belt pretensioner can be foreseen. Combined with the present acceleration sensing devices, redundant sensor systems could then be realized, increasing the safety margins required for adopting such systems in particular for small vehicles.
An optical microsystem for predictive crash sensing
Optisches Mikrosystem zur Früherkennung von Unfallsituationen
1996
9 Seiten, 3 Bilder, 4 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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