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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."
Perhaps it is time for slashdot to make roland an official demiurge with the power to automatically post everything he puts into his blog and thus eliminate the middleman.
What if you have a light with green arrow telling you to go right and a sign next to it saying no right turn on red. I have pictures and a ticket for obeying a traffic signal. Unfortunately, i do not have time to drive 3 hours to fight it.
While this system could help those that just dont pay attention, its not much help when streets are mislabled.
Slashdot editors - are you actually getting paid off by "Roland Piquepaille" for this, or just tremendously vulnerable to astroturfing?
My first impression here is that this isn't the easiest way to accomplish things.
Three cameras?
Wouldn't it be easier to add RFID (or something along those lines) to the street signs and then simply allow the car to read those? Consider the cost of adding this camera-based system to just one car. Multiply that by the number of cars that end up with it, and see how far that would go toward adding chips to street signs.
I'm pretty sure I read something about this kind of project here on Slashdot.
Actually, if we have cars that drive themselves, they can be coordinated centrally to time themselves to virtually eliminate street lights and traffic jams.
Imagine the cars on the road impromptu trains, with many cars drafting each other. With humans eliminated from the system, the safe gap between cars can be shortened greatly. I would gladly give up driving to a _great_ AI to know _exactly_ when I have to leave the house to get to my destination.
Problem is, I wouldn't trust the AI until it has been tested _years_ in the field. Maybe driving freight on a specialized set of lanes.
Other problem is, that to have a true system like this, non-AI controlled cars cannot be on the road, as they will add randomness to the central control.
jeeze. now our cars are going to nag us about our speed? what's next? why doesn't the car just phone in the ticket to the police?
:-(
if the government really didn't want us to speed they could just put governors in everyone's car and be done with it. why all these silly games, black boxes in cars, cars to recgonize signs, gps trackers?
fact of it all is, townships, counties even states NEED us to go above the "speed limit" else they wouldn't get to levy those hefty fines. governments make HUGE profits off of speeding tickets and it's big business.
maybe we need some sort of organized strike. have everyone agree NOT to speed one day out of the year. wonder how much money would be lost and how much those governments would be mad. and the poor police, they'd have to sit around eating doughnuts all day.
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Having to learn to drive during the 55 days in Oklahoma when the de facto speed limit was 70, I find it odd how well the Aussies obey the speed limit on the highways. yesterday I didn't see a single car going over 105 on the 100 km/hr freeway. This road is Interstate and Autobahn quality but has nearly 100% speed limit compliance which sounds like a good thing toll you check the accident stats and find out that its 4 times deadlier than any Interstate or Autobahn and its not safer than a typical large city street. The Aussie freeways are the deadliest roads of their class in the world and as far as I know the only place that has such a high speed limit compliance. They do have speed cameras on the highways that can give everyone a ticket. They are building a camera system on the road between Melbourne and Sydney that will figure out when you leave and when you get to the state border and fine you based on the time you took.
No way does this system ever become mandatory:
1. If the system ever does become mandatory, you'll see a major increase in stolen traffic signs. Highway departments already have enough trouble trying to replace missing/damaged signage.
2. If it's in our cars, it wil be in the cars of our elected officials. We already know that our officials don't like to drive the speed limit. This system will put more heat on them.
Deep down in his heart of hearts, I'm sure Nick knows perfectly well that trying to use computer vision to read road signs is at best a temporary hack for a legacy system. However, it's a nice application to show to wowser politicians to get them to fund his real interest - computer vision algorithms.
It's the same reason why a lot of American scientists take money from the armed forces; they're neutral at best about the application, but it's a great way to get funding.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I wonder what the system will do when it encounters signs with logical impossibilities? I've driven through an intersection in NYC that had opposite-facing "one way" signs on the same utility pole, along with a "no entry" sign at the entrance to the only other way out. Eventually I figured out which one was wrong, or I guess I'd still be there. Somehow I doubt that this system would come up with the same answer I did.
I wonder how well this system works in a snowstorm. Or even after a snowstorm when there's clumps of snow on the sign. I expect it can't read things better than a human in those conditions.
The problem is the map data isn't any good and its very expensive. The Aussie gov't wants to change about $25 per suburb per user for road data. There are about 1000 suburbs in the state of Victoria. That data isn't very high quality and will be on some unknown map datum so you can't just use it as is. Compare that to the free data you can get on any US city thats almost all on the WGS84 datum so the coordinates match what the GPS says.
Perhaps the solution is to assemble map data independently. Outfitting vehicles with a passenger who operates a laptop with GPS and indicates what street one is on should pretty much do it. I know there's a lot of road in Australia (although I suspect the US has significantly more, there's less open spaces, .au just has more ground to cover and mostly doesn't cover it) but I think it's pretty doable. Just use some nice fuel-efficient cars, like your 200SXs :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can be written a ticket for driving the speed limit (say, 65mph) in the left lane when the speed of traffic is 85mph. Driving in traffic, like much of life, requires rational adaptation rather than slavish adherence to the letter of the law. Sometimes it's more important to be safe than to obey the law.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
In places like New Zealand we can have a range of speed limits (50,60,70,80,100km/h), and some roads vary as you move through dense areas into less dense. It would be nice to have the car remember what the speed limit was. I have driven along the road, stopped at a place for a few hours, and when returning to the road couldn't remember what the speed limit for the current section was.