Image of the Month: Programmable Automotive Headlights Make Driving Glare Free and Safer

High beams are designed to illuminate dark roads, but may temporarily blind surrounding drivers. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed smart automotive headlights that light up the road without glaring other drivers.

The Programmable Automotive Headlights, based on a single hardware design, can detect other drivers and automatically disable the light directed at them, while still providing adequate illumination of the environment. The system consists of millions of beams with ultra short latency and can react almost instantly to surrounding changes. It is programmable and can perform many tasks, including anti-glare high beams, improving visibility during adverse weather conditions, increasing contrast of lanes, and early visual warning of obstacles. The design and findings were recently reported to the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich, Switzerland.

For more details about the Programmable Automotive Headlights, please visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smartheadlight/.