A Simple and Effective Display for Night Vision Systems

The next generation of automotive night vision systems will likely continue to display to the driver enhanced images of the forward driving scene. In some displays there may also be highlighting of pedestrians and animals, which has been argued to be the primary safety goal of night vision systems. The authors present here the method that was used to design a conceptual display for night vision systems. Although the primary focus of the method is on safety analysis, consideration is given to driver performance with the system, and exposure to alerts. It also addresses user acceptance and annoyance, distraction, and expected behavior adaptation. The resulting driver interface is a simple and potentially effective display for night vision systems. It consists of a pedestrian icon that indicates when there are pedestrians near the future path of the vehicle. An initial prototype of this night-vision DVI was tested on the road and showed promising results despite its simplicity. It improved pedestrian detection distance from 34 to 44 m and decreased the overall ratio of missed pedestrians from 13% to 5%, correspondingly. The improvement may be attributable to the icon alerting the driver to the presence of a pedestrian. In this experiment, the drivers were probably more alert to the possible presence of pedestrians than drivers in the real world, suggesting that the effect of the icon might be even larger in actual use.