Anti-collision or collision avoidance systems have been present in some cars but the job they do is often very basic. NEC’s new system promises a much larger spectrum of activities, to the point of letting the car drive itself. This IMAPCAR chip processor has a powerful vision processing system that allows vehicles to notice the presence of pedestrians, road markers and lane closings and all this in real time. The chip follows a parallel processing architecture with 128 pixel processors. The video image from the camera is transmitted to these 100 MHz processors, each pixel getting its own processor. The system also supports a database to store the wealth of visual cues generated over the time. Though the system still has trouble recognizing pedestrians owing to the difference in human shapes, it does see the impending collision and can pull the brakes. With everything in place, the system can work wonders towards the reduction of accidents on the roads.
Via: Wired
