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Smart Cars Tell You About Road Signs
Roland Piquepaille writes "There are many systems designed to help car drivers and to improve safety. In this article, New Scientist focuses on a system developed by the National ICT Australia lab (NICTA). This new driver assistance system uses three cameras, one to look at road signs ahead and two to check what the driver is looking at. The images are transmitted to a computer which decodes the road signs and the driver's reactions to them. If you're driving above speed limits, you will be alerted. Same thing if you're about to pass a stop sign without reducing speed. You still can choose to ignore the warnings, but if you're caught speeding, you'll have to tell the police officer why you refused to slow down. This system is currently being tested and appears to perform well especially in poor lighting conditions. Read more for other references about similar helping systems and to see how the road signs are analyzed."
3 Cameras? how about just imbedding a small transmitter into the sign itself and a simple reciever in the car? The reciever gets within 300ft of a sign and picks up a coded transmission, basically indicating "stopsignahead". I guess you would have to rig a constant power source for the sign, but it can't be anymore complicated/expensive then 2 cameras tied into a PC dedicated soley to object recognition while one tracks where you're looking. This just has over-engineered written all over it, frankly.
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There is no denying that Roland Piquepaille has an inordinate number of posted stories, but other than jealously (hey, I've had plenty of good rejected stories, too), I don't know why people complain.
In general, not only does RP submit fairly interesting articles (most have 100+ replies), but he also does a better than average job writing up a concise summary of said article.
Imagine you are a Slashdot editor going through the submission queue. Not only do you have to find a steady stream of News For Nerds and Stuff That Matters(tm), but you also have to find well-written submissions that aren't going to take significant work to fix spelling and grammar errors (at least I assume they try to fix those - I haven't seen much evidence so far). When you find a RP submission in the queue, there is a very good chance that you can just cut-n-paste it into a story. Slashdot editors are lazy, just like everyone else...
The only thing you can really fault RP for is the gratuitous links back to his blog. On the other hand, he does provide additional details, as promised, and generally does provide an original link in the summary.
So if you want to complain about RP, go right ahead. But his frequently accepted stories are more likely due to the quality and reliability of his submissions, rather than payola or a conspiracy.