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Saturday, November 02, 2019

Seeing Around the Corner for Autonomous Cars

Have mentioned this kind of tech a number of times, a kind of sensor data enhancement idea that has been considered for some time.  Note in my 'seeing around the corner' tag,  a link to a Quanta Mag article, and also some of my own musings about pinhole/pinspeck cameras and their use for inferring information about evironments.

MIT’s shadow-watching tech could let autonomous cars see around corners   By Luke Dormehl  in Digitaltrends

Whether it’s cyclists about to lurch into the wrong lane or a pedestrian getting ready to cross the street, self-driving cars need to be hyperaware of what is going on around them at all times. But one thing they can’t do is to see around corners. Or can they? In a paper presented at this week’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have shown off technology which could allow autonomous vehicles or other kinds of robots to do exactly that — by looking for changes in shadows on the ground to reveal if a moving object is headed their way.

“ShadowCam operates by detecting small differences in shadows and using this information to detect possible static and dynamic objects that are otherwise out of your line of sight,” Alexander Amini and Igor Gilitschenski, two MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers who worked on the project, told Digital Trends via email. “First of all, we need to focus on the same region of interest as we move, which we achieve by integrating a visual motion estimation technique into ShadowCam. Based on this stabilized image of the region of interest, we [then] use color amplification combined with a dynamic threshold on the intensity changes.”   .... "

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