OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced development of lane-departure warning technology that can be applied to a vehicle-mounted wide-angle camera as a drive recorder to promote safer driving.

In recent years, an eagerly anticipated development in efforts to reduce traffic accidents has been the use of the wide-angle lens of drive recorders, which are increasingly being used mainly on commercial vehicles, together with lane-departure warnings, which alert drivers when deviating from a lane. However, typical lane-departure warning technology relies on narrow-angle cameras that only view the white lines marking a lane at considerable distance. Wide-angle cameras that only view some of the lane markers at a short distance do not always detect the lane correctly, and have yet to meet the expected level of performance for warnings.

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed a driving lane recognition technology that estimates the correct lane configuration for the entire road by smoothly joining multiple images of the road surface, and compensates for the positional deviations relative to road lane markers. The result is a lane-departure warning performance of 95%, which exceeds the level of devices that use narrow-angle cameras, even with wide-angle cameras. This technology adds lane-departure warnings to bring new preventive-safety features to the driving experience without requiring the installation of a separate camera.

Details of this technology are being presented at the Symposium on Sensing via Image Information (SSII2014), opening June 11 at the Pacifico Yokohama.