The seeing passenger car 'VaMoRs-P'

Abstract

A passenger car Mercedes 500 SEL has been equipped with vision in the framework of the EUREKA-project 'Pometheus III'. Road and object recognition is performed both in a look-ahead and in a look-back region; this allows an internal servo-maintained representation of the entire situation around the vehicle using the 4D approach to dynamic machine vision. Obstacles are detected and tracked both in the forward and in the backward viewing range up to about 100 meters distance; depending on the computing power available for this purpose up to 4 or 5 objects may be tracked in parallel in each hemisphere. A fixation type viewing direction control with the capability of saccadic shifts of viewing direction for attention focussing has been developed. The overall system comprises about 60 transputers of T-222 and T-800. Beside a PC as transputer host all other processors in VaMoRs-P are transputers. A description of the parallel processing architecture is given; the system integration follows the well proven paradigm of orientation towards 4D physical objects and expectations with prediction error feedback. This allows frequent data driven bottom-up and model driven top-down integration steps for efficient and robust object tracking.