Analysis of traffic accidents shows that approximately 70% of traffic accidents involving pedestrian fatalities in Japan take place at night. The main cause in almost all these accidents is poor visibility of the pedestrian resulting in failure of perception on the part of the driver. Therefore, reasoning that this problem would be effectively addressed by improving night-time perception by the driver and a system to warn of the presence of pedestrians, the authors conducted research and development on the following two systems and installed them on an experimental vehicle: (1) Active Headlights - This system moves the upper reflectors of the headlights in accordance with the angle to which the steering wheel is turned and the speed of the vehicle in order to control the distribution of light. This produces a distribution of light suited to road conditions when driving through a curve or making a left or right turn at an intersection, and so on, thus enabling quicker detection of pedestrians. (2) Honda Night Vision System - This system uses stereoscopic infrared cameras to detect high-temperature objects and warns of their presence by voice guidance and display of a visual image on a head-up display (HUD) that highlights the objects. This makes it possible to easily perceive distant pedestrians that would not be readily visible to the naked eye. These two systems have a synergistic effect (the active headlights expanding the nearby field of visual perception, and the night vision system extending the distant field of visual perception) that has allowed a significant extension of the range of possible perception of pedestrians at night. The results of tests using actual vehicles have confirmed the effectiveness of these systems in improving the visibility of pedestrians, showing that they may be expected to have a major impact on accident reduction.
Abstract