The Automatic Blind Spot Camera: A Vision-Based Active Alarm System

Abstract

In this paper we present a vision-based active safety system targeting the blind spot zone of trucks. Each year, these blind spot accidents are responsible for numerous fatalities and heavily injured. Existing commercial systems seem not to be able to cope with this problem completely. Therefore, we propose a vision-based safety system relying solely on the blind spot camera images. Our system is able to detect all vulnerable road users (VRUs) in the blind spot zone, and automatically generates an alarm towards the truck driver. This inherently is a challenging task. Indeed, such active safety system implicitly requires extremely high accuracy demands at very low latency. These two demands are contradictory, and thus very difficult to unite. However, our real-life experiments show that our proposed active alarm system achieves excellent accuracy results while meeting these stringent requirements.