More than 1,200,000 accidents occur every year in the European traffic with about 1,600,000 injured persons and 42,000 deaths. Studies estimated that the annual rate of deaths and serious injuries was reduced by 120,000, since introduction of passive safety systems. To obtain a further improvement active safety systems e.g. collision avoidance, pre crash and ACC sensorial systems must be integrated into future cars. Therefore sensors detecting a critical situation before the crash are needed. IBEO Laserscanners and its integrated algorithms outlined in the following are able to deliver data for such active safety systems. Current car safety systems like airbags and safety belts are passive systems. Modern car assistance systems e.g. ASR, ABS, ESP, etc. are based only on vehicle data. Future safety systems will also include object recognition in the nearfield around the vehicle, especially the frontal area to detect dangerous situations. The classification of detected objects is very important to find out how dangerous the object is for the passengers of the vehicle and the vehicle itself. Besides, it is of interest to get information about the potential hazard for the object to protect e. g. a pedestrian in case of a crash. In the past IBEO Laserscanners were used for several applications with convincing results. Based on experiences of projects and applications from the last years IBEO is developing new Laserscanners containing improved object detection, tracking and classification algorithms.
Abstract