Surround View System for Vehicles and its Advantages for Drivers

ADAS - Advanced Driving Assistance System is a very popular research area all around the globe and has unbelievable future scope. Within ADAS, the latest developing area and market is of Surround view system or Surround vision or Top view system. These systems are meant to provide a central display of the vehicle to the driver from the perspective of a bird's vision.  Hence, another name given to such systems is "Birds' eye view". A glimpse of Surround vision is shown in the figure below. As the name suggests, surround view system provides the view of immediate surroundings to the drivers. Such views are of great assistance to the drivers in precise operations viz., parking maneuvers, driving in heavy traffic conditions etc.

Any bird eye vision system typically involves 4-6 wide angle fish-eye lens cameras mounted all around the vehicle. The installed/mounted cameras have Field of View up to 180 degrees. Such lenses are preferred so that immediate surrounding is completely visible even after the data loss during the implementation of algorithm on captured frames. 

Two types of camera arrangements are generally seen: 

• 4 cameras: front, back and one on each side view mirrors.
• 6 cameras: 1 on all four corners, front and back.

Out of these two, the former is most common because of reasons like lesser complications, initial cost-effectiveness etc.

Advantages to Drivers:

1. Assistance in parking maneuvers because surrounding vehicles and parking slots are easily visible and driver can solely focus on driving rather than peeping into the mirrors for parking safely.
2. Eliminates the use of mirrors by providing the complete view of surrounding on a single screen.
3. Any object or vehicle approaching or running close to the vehicle is visible at once.
4. Being "top-view", the system is free of perspective distortion. In layman's language, drivers are free of constraints like "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear".
5. Works properly even on slopes because of reasonably large field of view.
6. Driver error is reduced or even eliminated, and efficiency in traffic and transport is enhanced.
7. High-performance driving can be conducted regardless of the vision, weather and environmental conditions.
8. Many more vehicles can be accommodated, on regular highways but especially on dedicated lanes