Optical blind spot detection system

Project (M.S., Electrical and Electronic Engineering) -- California State University, Sacramento, 2011.According the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 826,000 vehicles in North America are involved in lane-change accidents each year [1]. Although the fatality rate is low compared to other types of accidents, the extent of property damage and injury are high. This has therefore remained a cause of concern to the public. There are a few preventive devices that employ radar sensors have been advertised to use as blind spot detectors, but none of them looks promising or is commercially available to the automobile industry. Automakers have been longing to introduce their vehicles equipped with high-tech systems that can see beyond the driver's peripheral vision - the dangerous blind spots.\ud This project introduces a simple and inexpensive Optical Blind Spot Detection System (OBSDS) that is designed to assist drivers to consistently monitor the ???No Zones??? known as blind spots. The system uses a pair of infrared sensors to detect vehicles approaching the blind spots from the adjacent lanes and alert the driver with visual and audio signals before he or she proceeds on a lane change. \ud The Optical Blind Spot Detection System was successfully designed and tested on a passenger vehicle. The maximum distance of detection is two meters. This range can be increased by adding more powerful infrared sensors to the circuit. \ud Another good application of the OBSDS is for parallel parking. In this case, the system is used as an aid for detecting the distance between the bumpers of a vehicle and any objects behind it. The distances can be understood from the combination of the visual and audio alerts. \ud With the addition of a motion detector circuit, the OBSDS can also be used to detect the present of pedestrians at intersection traffics. This is a very useful application to help reducing the pedestrian deaths which occur in 17 percent of all traffic fatalities [2].Electrical and Electronic Engineerin