Pedestrian detection

If this system works as well as advertised then I can imagine car insurance being higher if you don't have one of these fitted.



Knowing how fallible vision systems can be, especially when you have distortions produced by rain or snow or low lighting conditions, false positives could really be a problem if they cause the brakes to be automatically activated. The vision sensor could be combined with GPS to ensure that it's only active in areas where pedestrians are likely to be present (i.e. not on motorways), and if you wanted to get even more clever the pedestrian detections could be stored and uploaded to a central server in order to calculate a "probability of pedestrians" at each location, which can then be used as a prior probability by the detection algorithm.

Also another way to help reduce road accidents might be for the vehicle to have access to a traffic accident statistics database somewhere in "the cloud". You could then maybe have a coloured indicator on the dashboard to provide some notification to the driver if the GPS location is within an area where accidents are more frequent than average.