Artificial intelligence: An incredible future for the automotive sector

Machine vision as a safety measure in driving

Artificial intelligence applied to the car is on everyone's lips: Every day there are hundreds of news about amazing autonomous cars driving through our cities that lead us to imagine a revolutionary future.

Probably this projection is due to memories of our childhood, where films full of robots capable of interacting with human beings made us dream of a fantastic future. In fact, everyone is fascinated by the idea of machines capable of doing our work, helping us at home or what is already a reality: driving for us.

But reality is much simpler and more complex at the same time: "artificial vision" is only an expression referring to algorithms capable of recognizing patterns inside an image.

In other words, machine vision devices used by the automotive sector base their technology on their ability to recognize patterns of "pedestrians," "cyclists," and other vehicles.

Artificial vision is based on recognizing patterns of pedestrians, cyclists and other actors involved in driving

Although said like this it sounds simple, you have to consider that these devices never get tired or distracted: that is their main advantage. Statistics reveal that 80% of car accidents are due to driver distractions. In this sense it is evident how an artificial vision device can help us in those cases in which there are distractions in driving and we fail to detect a dangerous situation in time.

When the machine exceeds human capacity

But in addition, in recent years artificial vision has come to exceed human capabilities thanks to state-of-the-art sensors: there are in fact cameras such as thermographic ones that can see through smoke, fog and snow.

Lidar cameras measure the distance between objects with a very small margin of error.

In addition, we are all already accustomed to the images of infrared cameras that they see in complete darkness.