J Intell Manuf DOI 10.1007/s10845-011-0618-1 Designing an integrated driver assistance system using image sensors M. Akhlaq · Tarek R. Sheltami · Bo Helgeson · Elhadi M. Shakshuki Received: 5 July 2011 / Accepted: 16 December 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Road accidents cause a great loss to human lives and assets. Most of the accidents occur due to human errors, such as bad awareness, distraction, drowsiness, low train- ing, and fatigue. Advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) can reduce the human errors by keeping an eye on the driv- ing environment and warning a driver to the upcoming dan- ger. However, these systems come only with modern luxury cars because of their high cost and complexity due to sev- eral sensors employed. Therefore, camera-based ADAS are becoming an option due to their lower cost, higher availabil- ity, numerous applications and ability to combine with other systems. Targeting at designing a camera-based ADAS, we have conducted an ethnographic study of drivers to know what information about the driving environment would be useful in preventing accidents. It turned out that information on speed, distance, relative position, direction, and size and type of the nearby objects would be useful and enough for implementing most of the ADAS functions. Several cam- M. Akhlaq College of Computer Science and Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia e-mail: akhlaq@kfupm.edu.sa T. R. Sheltami Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia e-mail: tarek@kfupm.edu.sa B. Helgeson School of Computing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Box 520, 372 25 Ronneby, Sweden e-mail: bo.helgeson@bth.se E. M. Shakshuki (B ) Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6, Canada e-mail: elhadi.shakshuki@acadiau.ca era-based techniques are available for capturing the required information. We propose a novel design of an integrated cam- era-based ADAS that puts technologies—such as five ordi- nary CMOS image sensors, a digital image processor, and a thin display—into a smart system to offer a dozen advanced driver assistance functions. A basic prototype is also imple- mented using MATLAB. Our design and the prototype tes- tify that all the required technologies are now available for implementing a full-fledged camera-based ADAS. Keywords Image sensors · Video-based analysis · Advanced driver assistance system · Context-awareness · Road safety · Smart cars · Intelligent transportation system Introduction Annually, road accidents cause about 1.2 million deaths, over 50 million injuries, and global economic cost of over US$ 518 billion (Peden et al. 2004). About 90% of the accidents happen due to the driver behavior (Treat et al. 1977), such as bad awareness of driving environment, low training, dis- traction, work over-load or under-load, and low physical or physiological conditions. An advanced driver assistance sys- tem (ADAS) can play role in improving driver awareness and hence performance by providing relevant information as and when needed. ADAS augment safe and smooth driving by actively monitoring the driving environment and producing a warning or taking over the control in highly dangerous sit- uations. Most of the existing systems focus on only single useful service, such as parking assistance, forward collision warning, lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, and driver drowsiness detection. Recently, many researchers have proposed integrated ADAS that combines multiple services into a single system in an efficient and cost effective way. 123