INTEGRATED CAMERAS AS A REPLACEMENT FOR VEHICULAR MIRRORS

Abstract

Drivers’ visibility is an area of automobile safety that has seen very limited improvement over the past several decades. Limited visibility is responsible for many car accidents all across America. Mirrors require constant readjustment, and are easily blocked. There is currently a lot of interest in ways to reduce or eliminate all mirrors on a car, and one such method is through a wide-angle network of cameras mounted on the vehicle’s rear. Using real-time video processing, the data from several cameras can be spliced together, and displayed on a vehicle’s dashboard in an intuitive, easy to understand fashion that a driver can quickly see without having to turn away from the road. This has extensive application to light armored vehicles in the military, as well as to automotive designers today.