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US 5,612,686 AGranted
Method and an apparatus for monitoring the environment around a vehicle and an operation support system using the same
AssigneeHitachi, Ltd.
InventorsKazuaki Takano, Naoyuki Tanaka, Makoto Shioya, Takuya Imaide, Kenichirou Kurata
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Safety of the distance between vehicles is judged by monitoring whether or not an object other than a front road surface, namely, a preceding vehicle, exists in a predetermined area of the front road surface which is recognized by a picture processing unit used as a sensor for recognizing traffic states of the front road, without recognizing an image of a preceding vehicle having a complicated shape and a plurality of colors of the preceding vehicle by means of picture processing.
Claims5
A vehicle operation support system, comprising:
- a picture pickup device attached to a vehicle for picking up a picture of a road surface in front of the vehicle so that the lane position of the vehicle is arranged almost at the center of the picked up picture;
- a control unit, including a picture processing unit, for processing picture data picked up by said picture pickup device, a vehicle running state judgment unit for judging states of said vehicle and an actuator drive unit;
- and
- an alarm unit for generating alarms;
- whereby said picture processing unit generates display data representing a trapezoidal personal area enclosed by right and left white lines of a lane of said vehicle and two preset horizontal lines to represent a picture of the road surface in front of the vehicle, and wherein said actuator drive unit is operated and an alarm for urging an operator to initiate a steering operation is generated from said alarm unit, when a difference between lengths between said right and said left line type marks of said trapezoidal personal area exceeds a predetermined first threshold value.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.