Driver assistance: an integration of vehicle monitoring and control

About 1.17 million people die in road crashes around the world each year. It is estimated that up to 30% of these fatalities are caused by fatigue and inattention. There are systems able to detect what is happening outside of the car, e.g., lane tracking, obstacle detection, pedestrian detection etc. Further on, there are also means for monitoring the actions of the driver. A natural step is to fuse the available data from within and outside of the car, and suggest a suitable response. This paper discusses driver assistance systems, lists a set of necessary core competencies of such a system and in particular presents a system for force-feedback in the steering wheel when crossing lanes. The presented system utilises a robust lane tracker which is experimentally evaluated for the purpose of driver assistance. In addition, preliminary results from simultaneous driver monitoring and lane tracking are presented that indicates a good correlation between the two, i.e. the driver´s gaze direction and the structure of the road. These data can in turn be used for more advanced driver assistance systems in the future.