Continental will add a stereo camera to the comprehensive ContiGuard safety system as an integral element of its forward looking braking systems. This will help prevent or at least reduce the seriousness of the frequent accidents involving pedestrians or with vehicles at intersections; to date, accidents like these make up almost half (46.6 percent) of those traffic accidents in Germany that result in major personal injury.
Since the stereo camera has two ‘eyes’, it is able to use the difference in the images within one camera shot to detect every type of obstacle, from loads that have fallen onto the road to people and animals, and can determine their size and the distance to them. This cannot be done sufficiently reliably with mono-cameras, which also have to be taught to recognize a car or a motorcycle and which are then only able to identify objects that they have learned.
In addition to the spatial position (3-D) of any object that it detects, the stereo camera can also determine the direction in which every pixel of an identified object is moving along the horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal axes.
This six-dimensional (6-D) identification makes absolutely clear whether an object is moving and in which direction. Combined with object classification, based on common characteristics, this process invests the stereo camera with such a high standard of decision-making certainty that it is able to initiate emergency braking (up to 1 g) if the driver fails to react to the object.