Proposal of a driver assistance system based on video and radar data fusion

In recent years, increasing road safety has become one of the most critical issues in the European Commission policy. The ambitious target is to halve the number of fatal car accidents by 2010. Up to now, research efforts have been mainly focused on the idea of making cars safer and safer; now, the focus is to exploit new technologies in order to reduce probability of car accidents. This paper deals with the possibility of integrating two technologies, chaos based anticollision radars and image analysis systems, in order to provide the driver as much information as possible about the environment where his vehicle is moving, to reduce and possibly cancel the risk of collisions. Preliminary results are presented about the performance of an automatic vision system to be used in cooperation with an anticollision radar system, and possible scenarios of converging technologies are outlined.