PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | October 29, 1996
Proc. SPIE. 2904, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XV: Algorithms, Techniques,Active Vision, and Materials Handling
KEYWORDS: Roads, Visibility through fog, Fiber optic gyroscopes, Backscatter, Light scattering, Receivers, Solids, Headlamps, Active vision, Visibility
A special case of civilian active vision has been investigated here, namely, a vision system by car anti-fog headlamps. A method to estimate the light-engineering criteria for headlamp performances and simulate the operation of the system through a turbid medium, such as fog, is developed on the base of the analytical procedures of the radiative transfer theory. This method features in include the spaced light source and receiver of a driver's active vision system, the complicated azimuth-nonsymmetrical emissive pattern of the headlamps, and the fine angular dependence of the fog phase function near the backscattering direction. The final formulas are derived in an analytical form providing additional convenience and simplicity for the computations. The image contrast of a road object with arbitrary orientation, dimensions, and shape and its limiting visibility range are studied as a function of meteorological visibility range in fog as well as of various emissive pattern, mounting, and adjustment parameters of the headlamps. Optimization both light-engineering and geometrical characteristics of the headlamps is shown to be possible to enable the opportunity to enhance the visibility range and, hence, traffic safety.
