Assessment of the FOE for side impact alert

Under the EU funded project APROSYS, an integrated sensor-actuator system is being built to detect and mitigate side impacts. Radar and stereo video in the target car will be used to detect and track potential bullet objects. As a result, actuators will be triggered if a crash is predicted by the sensor system. The actuators that will be developed under APROSYS can temporarily modify the structure of the target car in order to distribute the impact energy in an optimal way. In this contribution the problem is addressed to detect side impacts by analyzing image sequences of a side-looking camera. The authors analyze geometric relations both in image and world coordinates. It can be concluded that the detection of expanding flow fields with a focus of expansion inside the image boundaries is not sufficient to unambiguously detect side impacts. The problem is further constrained by taking into account the shape of the camera carrying car, and by assuming a minimum velocity of the impacting car. Further work will address the robustness of the approach, and its optimization with respect to a real-time implementation.