Computer Vision News - February 2019

from the market. Hopefully, in the coming months, we’ll see a lot of deals closing for our customers. Even without having a booth at CES, we feel like one of the innovators at the show, working together with our clients and vendors as a team, pushing technology and the Automotive industry forward. Actually, that’s the way we work with our clients. We become an extended arm of their R&D team, working with them to achieve their goals, meet the roadmap and develop innovative solutions. This year, some exhibitors took things a step up, showcasing different kinds of applications and user experiences inside the car, which raise the question: if you don’t need to drive, what will you actually do when driven in the car? Many vendors deal with different kinds of media, entertainment and information systems that allow the passenger to do a lot more when “not driving”. We saw technology that allows people to operate these systems without actually touching any buttons. The passenger uses vision, hand poses, and facial movements to easily control the systems. Besides the large manufacturers, I noticed a decent number of smaller companies attending this year, mainly from the United States and China. They produce technologies and applications that just two or three years ago seemed very far away. For example, companies manufacture smaller and more efficient LiDAR solutions, which were very complicated to build only a few years back. Now, instead of just taking images and video, different vision-based solutions (like smart dash cameras) actually embed AI technologies and add ADAS or ADAS- like technologies into relatively simple and inexpensive units. Autonomous driving could even revolutionize public transportation. I have seen representatives from many municipalities exploring the booths. After all, self-driving vehicles have the potential to both change the transportation services to the public and provide additional added value to municipalities, such as: monitoring road conditions, smart alerting systems and increasing public safety. Some manufacturers, like VOLVO, decided to push forward the Level 2+ ADAS systems, taking the very current, advanced technologies and embedding them as is into the market. They are starting to sell them to test the market, which has matured in the last few years, showing that one mature system can give a stable solution for today’s modern driving challenges, while waiting to the full autonomous car revolution to happen. We also see, a wide market acceptance that one sensor will never be enough and there is a need to fuse certain kinds of sensors and combine technologies together, to achieve the end goal. It is clear that the autonomous revolution is going to happen. Although it will take a bit more time than originally anticipated, the new mobility revolution is coming. For a practical example, see the project on page 12 . Pauline Luc 35 Computer Vision News The ADAS field at CES 2019 Event “The autonomous revolution is going to happen. Although it will take a bit more time than originally anticipated, the new mobility revolution is coming”