Monitoring Technology to Improve Vehicle Safety

Ana­log Devices announced a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Jun­go  to devel­op a Time-of-Flight (ToF) and 2D infrared- (IR) based cam­era solu­tion to enable dri­ver- and in-cab­in mon­i­tor­ing in vehi­cles. The com­bi­na­tion of ADI’s ToF tech­nol­o­gy with Jungo’s Codriv­er soft­ware is expect­ed to enable the mon­i­tor­ing of vehi­cle occu­pants for lev­els of drowsi­ness and dis­trac­tion by observ­ing head and body posi­tion as well as eye gaze. The solu­tion is also expect­ed to enable smart vehi­cle inter­ac­tion based on face, body, and hand ges­tures, and offer a facial recog­ni­tion capa­bil­i­ty that iden­ti­fies indi­v­d­u­als in the cab­in and gives them access to fea­tures such as info­tain­ment per­son­al­iza­tion, per­son­al­ized ser­vices, and rideshar­ing payments.

“The col­lab­o­ra­tion between ADI and Jun­go opens the door to new and inno­v­a­tive aug­ment­ed real­i­ty appli­ca­tions beyond today’s ges­ture con­trol,” said Vlad Bulavsky, prod­uct line direc­tor, Auto­mo­tive Con­nec­tiv­i­ty and Sens­ing, Ana­log Devices. “We believe our work togeth­er can  bring cab­in sens­ing with ToF-based dri­ver- and occu­pant mon­i­tor­ing to the next lev­el and improve vehi­cle safety.”

3D ToF is a type of scan­ner­less LIDAR (Light Detec­tion and Rang­ing) that uses high pow­er opti­cal puls­es in dura­tions of nanosec­onds to cap­ture depth infor­ma­tion (typ­i­cal­ly over short dis­tances) from a scene of inter­est. ADI offers prod­ucts and solu­tions to direct­ly enhance the capa­bil­i­ties of 3D ToF sys­tems, includ­ing pro­cess­ing, laser dri­vers and pow­er man­age­ment, along with devel­op­ment boards and software/firmware to aid in quick imple­men­ta­tion of 3D ToF solutions.

Jungo’s CoDriv­er soft­ware uses state-of-the-art deep learn­ing, machine learn­ing, and com­put­er vision algo­rithms to detect in real time the dri­ver state using dri­ver fac­ing cam­eras.  It also sup­ports in-vehi­cle full detec­tion tech­nol­o­gy with func­tions such as count­ing of the num­ber of occu­pants, detec­tion of seat belt wear­ing or detec­tion or observ­ing of crit­i­cal med­ical conditions.

“Jungo’s CoDriv­er mon­i­tor­ing algo­rithms are used by orig­i­nal equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers (OEMs) to keep their dri­vers and pas­sen­gers safe and devel­op inno­v­a­tive use cas­es that under­stand an occupant’s state while in the vehi­cle,” said Ophir Herb­st, CEO, Jun­go Ltd. “We are delight­ed to col­lab­o­rate with Ana­log Devices to make vehi­cles smarter and enable OEMs to com­ply with reg­u­la­tions and inno­vate in their next-gen­er­a­tion vehi­cles by using our algo­rithms and ADI’s lead­ing ToF technology.”