Smartphone based systems for better driverless cars developed

A SMART SOLUTION TO FILL IN GPS GAPS IN DRIVERLESS CARS

Researchers have developed two new smartphone-based systems that can accelerate development of driverless cars by identifying a user’s location and orientation in places where GPS does not function.

These can also identify the various components of a road in real-time on a regular camera or smartphone.

“Vision is our most powerful sense and driverless cars will also need to see. But teaching a machine to see is far more difficult than it sounds,” said Professor Roberto Cipolla from University of Cambridge who led the research.

The first system, called SegNet, can take an image of a street it hasn’t seen before and classify it, sorting objects into 12 categories such as roads and street signs in real-time.

The researchers presented details of two technologies at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Santiago, Chile, recently.