Rear-end Collision Prevention Using Mobile Devices

Portable devices like tablet PCs and smart phones are being used more often these days within the vehicular environment. Drivers use them for listening to music, navigation assistance, accessing internet and also mainly for speaking over the phone. Most of these features are made possible in the portable devices due to the availability and use of many sensors such as global positioning system (GPS), cameras, microphones, accelerometer sensors and gyroscope sensors. Although most of the sensors were designed for gaming or a better user experience, within a vehicular environment, they provide valuable information of the ego-vehicle and the surrounding environment. This paper probes into the possibility of using these sensors to measure vehicle dynamics, thus making a portable device a driving safety tool. We aim to design an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that warns drivers of potential rear-end collision scenarios. Toward this goal, this study focuses on front vehicle tail-light detection using the embedded camera of a portable device. This frontal vehicle tail-light detector is also used to estimate the distance between the egoand front-vehicles based on the size of the detected tail-light. We propose a smart warning system using this information, together with the ego-vehicle dynamics computed using inertial measurement units (IMUs) (accelerometer and gyroscope). This system detects when the vehicle ahead brakes or intends to turn, and generates the warning signals when the speed of the ego-vehicle does not change accordingly.