Vision is our most powerful sense and driverless cars will also need to see, but teaching a machine to see is far more difficult than it sounds.
- Roberto Cipolla
Two newly-developed systems for driverless cars can identify a user’s location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of pounds.
The separate but complementary systems have been designed by researchers from the University of Cambridge and demonstrations are freely available online. Although the systems cannot currently control a driverless car, the ability to make a machine ‘see’ and accurately identify where it is and what it’s looking at is a vital part of developing autonomous vehicles and robotics.
Watch a video and read the full story
Image:SegNet demonstration
Credit: Alex Kendall
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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