thermal imaging and transportation

Thermal imaging and transportation

Thermal vision can address many transportation challenges, such as:

One of the main challenges in electric cars is to manage easily passenger’s wellness and comfort, without impacting battery operating life (more comfort often means more energy consumption). That’s why VALEO collaborates with SENSSIGHT to equip an EV vehicle with an embedded thermal infrared vision system.

Two kinds of vision devices have been installed in the car:

• One to capture the entire cabin, to count and locate people in the car. With these pieces of information, the smart car automatically adapts cabin temperature according to passengers’ needs. Thus, each heater is individually controlled to optimize the overall power consumption without impacting passengers’ comfort.

• One to extract from the infrared image of the driver’s face, some critical indicators of heat stress, such as his breathing rhythm and his skin temperature. So that the car can automatically adjust the heating level appropriately.

smart vision for autonomous vehicles

Vision accuracy is a critical challenge for the future autonomous vehicles, to detect and characterize, in real time, in any weather conditions and without any error, the kind and distance of all impediments on the road. Thanks to an optimized infrared scan of the road, and a performant embedded treatment, SENSSIGHT optronic systems can provide all data required for safety to autonomous vehicles:

• Easily distinguish an object from a living being
• Detect and recognize vehicles, road markings and traffic signs
• During night and day, in any weather conditions (smoke, mist, atmospheric turbulences, snow …)
• Over a long range (> 60m visibility even in 0 lux)

people counting in public transportation

Passenger demand, which is the key to planning an efficient public transport network, is usually unknown. This lack of information results in a public transport service that is not aligned with real passengers’ needs, which causes overcrowding and long waiting times on the one hand, with inefficient overprovision on the other.

With a passenger counting system, transport managers gain accurate key performance measures like passengers per mile, cost per passenger and number of passengers per driver, so they can schedule and forecast, increase user satisfaction and reduce their travel times.

But visible images raise many problems:  it is quite difficult to discriminate human beings out of the environment, image details require a complex treatment that cannot be done in an embedded system, the vision is accurate in the day but not at night, and the privacy is not respected.

With SENSSIGHT thermal embedded and low energy optronic systems, it becomes possible to count passengers:

• in real time,
• respecting privacy,
• under any light conditions
• with any kind of infrared imagers

SENSSIGHT systems also distinguish adult, child or animal thanks to a unique shape recognition algorithm.