Drivers Tend To Kill Pedestrians At Night. Thermal Imaging May Help.

It’s a somber relapse. In the U.S., pedestrian deaths are increasing.

As cars get more bloated and more dangerous to everyone on the roads, something we should be able to take for granted — simply going for a walk — is more hazardous than it should be.

This is the result not just of consumer preference, or of car design that has historically prioritized the safety of people within the cars, but mainly of political decisions to cater to drivers even though this makes roads less safe for all. One counterproductive yet common tactic has been to blame pedestrians for walking in unsafe areas rather than providing them with choices that are both safe and feasible.

Technology to consider vulnerable road users has limits, but also potential, in addressing road violence. And some technologists are betting on improved imaging as an important tool for improving visibility and safety.

This is because while car crashes in the U.S. are clustered around afternoon rush hour, the collisions that lead to pedestrian deaths are more likely to happen at night. Some of the technologies that shore up cars’ safety systems during the day have weak performance at night.

Importantly, pedestrian automatic emergency braking (AEB), which may become mandatory on U.S. cars in the future, tends to not perform well in the dark. Pedestrian AEB systems automatically put on the brakes when their sensors detect a pedestrian in danger from a collision. These sensors typically include cameras and radar. Sometimes lidar (light detection and ranging) is also used, though it remains more expensive than the other sensor types.

What safety systems in passenger cars generally don’t yet have is thermal imaging. Companies like Owl Autonomous Imaging are seeking to change that. “We read radiated energy that comes off everything,” explains Wade Appelman, the chief marketing officer for Owl Autonomous Imaging. “Everything has a temperature,” regardless of the lighting conditions.

Thermal cameras can provide finely detailed grayscale images in a variety of lighting and environmental conditions, including fog, rain, and bright lights (for instance, after emerging from a tunnel). According to Appelman, Owl Autonomous Imaging produces especially high-resolution images (from its Thermal Ranger sensor system) at lower cost (as the company builds its own chips), compared to other thermal imaging companies.

One question is whether this advancing technology is really necessary to produce cars that are safer at night. An organization attempting to answer this question is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a road-safety nonprofit that rates vehicle safety. In IIHS’ nighttime crash prevention tests, “vehicles that are performing well are relying on a combination of better headlights and improved camera systems that operate better in low light,” reports Joe Young, IIHS’ director of media relations.

In other words, there’s still a lot of room to get better, but substantial improvement is already possible using more common technologies. Essential here are better headlights. In IIHS’ latest tests of car headlight systems, fewer than half (43%) earned a good rating. “We know from studies of the real-world crash data that these ratings matter,” Young comments. “Vehicles that earn a good rating for visibility in our tests have 23% fewer nighttime pedestrian crashes than those that rate poor.”

One argument is that low-hanging fruit would produce results much sooner than waiting years for technology and regulations mandating technology to be rolled out. Young summarizes some of these (relatively) easy wins: “Better street lighting can make a difference for pedestrian safety at night, but many of the tactics that communities can use to make roads safer for pedestrians will produce benefits at all times of the day. This includes improving crossings, adding pedestrian infrastructure like median islands, and adding midblock crossings where needed.”

Like other road-safety advocates, Young focuses on speed reduction as the single most effective way to save lives on the roads. “This can be achieved through lower speed limits, increased enforcement, and roadway design changes,” Young comments. “Drivers have more time to see a pedestrian and react when they are traveling more slowly, and a slower impact can make a crash more survivable if it does happen.”

Lower speed limits can be very politically contentious, as Wales has shown recently. But they also save lives, as evident from politically courageous decisions in Brazil.

They also don’t require changes to car design. However, a full set of design, policy, and behavior changes will be needed to get anywhere near the goal many places have set of zero deaths and serious injuries from road traffic.

It’s in this context that thermal imaging may add to the suite of sensors that improve road safety — each of which has strengths and weaknesses. For example, standard cameras are needed to see colors, but struggle at night; radar has good range but limited detail; lidar is accurate but relatively pricey; and thermal is versatile but largely untested in vehicles outside of the military and autonomous trucking.

“Cars are always going to be adding and removing sensors based on their use case,” Appelman comments. “No sensor is perfect 100% of the time.”

But, as a part of a package of safety measures, thermal imaging may be part of the reforms desperately needed to bring road traffic deaths down.

Denial of responsibility! TechCodex is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.