Some drivers are quiet but still dangerous (in a road safety point of view) :
Most people think that brutal drivers (strong braking, etc …) are dangerous. The hypothesis is that they do not anticipate enough and then they are
led to brake very strongly. Many Insurance Companies developped their own onboard « dirving style » estimation that scores this kind of hypothesis.
To read more : Nexyad-ADAS
How to use SafetyNex V2.1 for Insurance applications, and for
Automotive applications (ADAS & autonomous vehicle)
by NEXYAD
INTRODUCTION: Description of 2.1 SafetyNex
SafetyNex is a software module proposed by the French company NEXYAD. This module aims to match the driving style (acceleration, vehicle speed) with the danger characteristics of infrastructure.
SafetyNex development started in 2001 and benefited from three national collaborative research programs (PREDIT and FUI) that allowed NEXYAD modeling expertise of road equipment notation accident-prone infrastructure.
Indeed, the accident-prone nature of a local infrastructure, cannot be deduced from statistical studies on this local element, for the simple reason that accidents are rare events.A driver has one accident every 70 000 km.
To investigate the accident, the experts of the equipment mainly use two methods:
. aggregated statistics at national and European level : it provides large numbers of accidents and thus make statistics relevant. But heterogeneous infrastructure through Europe makes it difficult to project results on a local infrastructure that has its own characteristics, sometimes far from the average characteristic in France or Europe.
. the observation of « near misses » or « almost accident » as they are numerous : most potential accidents can be nearly avoided by drivers. Experts of infrastructure developed observatories for those danger situations and it brings useful information.
From these elements, the experts of the infrastructure have published a set of rules for predicting accidents, based on characteristics, the accident-prone characters of a piece of infrastructure.
For example, a bend may be accident-prone if its radius greatly shortens in its middle (curve which closes), but a « normal » curve may become dangerous if it comes after a long distance of straight line (this is called « break out on the pathway « ).
NEXYAD integrated all these rules in SafetyNex and has made numerous tests on real world to validate the efficiency of scoring danger.
SafetyNex V2.1 reads on-board navigation map that gives infrastructure characteristics , downstream of the vehicle, and then SafetyNex scores the relevancy of the driving style, knowing the shape of the road ahead and other important things (pedestrian pathway, …).
Note: in a higher version (already being tested), SafetyNex may also reflect the presence of other users on the road (cars, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, pedestrians …) by coupling it to RoadNex (road detection by camera), and ObstaNex (obstacles detection by camera).
But this version will require to have appropriate computing power to process videos. The Moore law lets us think i twill be easy and cheap in 2 or 3 years.
For now, we think that adaptation of the driving type with infrastructure characteristics meets a real issue and SafetyNex V2.1 is the only available (and for sale) module in the world for performing this function.
The output computed by SafetyNex is the road safety risk, between 0 and 100%, at every moment.
It is possible to use SafetyNex in real time to alert the driver.
It also may be used off-line, aggregating the risk : SafetyNex used to complete big data with revelant variables to study the road safety risk, in a statistical way.
SafetyNex is available in three types of running environments:
. PC under Windows or Linux
. Electronic device of an Automotive Tier One Company, for the new vehicles and aftermarket
. smartphones
SafetyNex V2.1 FOR USE OF INSURANCE
Insurance Companies have several ways to use SafetyNex V2.1:
. free distribution of the SafetyNex App for smartphones to all their customers :
In this case, the business model is to seek partners who want to reduce their cost of acquiring customers online.
In fact, when you divide the advertising budget of a major retailer (Amazon, Fnac, Darty, …) by the number of purchases, there are about 30 euros (cost of a customer).
The idea of NEXYAD then is to propose a serious game that « gives » points to drivers who behave well.
These points are converted into « coupons » with one or more distributors. The drivers will go on the website in order to validate coupons by purchasing products. In doing so (spotted digitally with flash code …), the distributor will give back 15 euros : 7,5 euros for the cupons, and 7,5 euros for the Insurance Company that distributed the NEXYAD App to their millions of customers. The insurer therefore makes money and share revenue with NEXYAD and its technology partners.
This solution is particularly interesting for several reasons:
. the insurance company earns money directly on millions of purchases.
. drivers do their best to earn coupons, and therefore change their driving behavior to achieve it.
The insurer therefore modifies in a sustainable way the driving style, and contributes to the decline in the number of accidents. The Communications Department of the the Insurance company may use this fact for communicating it to the public.
. the largest distributors lower their customers acquisition costs and they can then lower their advertising budget
. the driver improves self safety, and is able to purchase more.
. distribution in an electronic device :
The electronic device has the advantage of being still operational without driver intervention.
This solution is particularly interesting for business fleets, and allows to quickly and efficiently initiate a type of pricing system « pay how you drive » that may be seen as an extension of the bonus / malus system, but with a predictive power.
. constitution of big data for actuaries:
Risk can be recorded onboard, or in aggregate, giving statisticians a new variable for more accuracy on pricing.
SafetyNex V2.1 FOR USE IN ADAS AND AUTONOMOUS CAR APPLICATIONS
The road safety risk measurement is of course interesting for automotive applications :
. SafetyNex read the shape of infrastructure downstream of the vehicle (electronic horizon), and can therefore help to choose which types of sensors are relevant.
. SafetyNex can estimate the maximum distance targetable by sensors (radar, camera, …) depending on the shape of the infrastructure (turn, climb, …)
. During a delegation of driving, the robot drives the vehicle and then SafetyNex V2.1 can estimate the road safety related to the automatic driving.
The road safety score can be used in several ways:
. Off-line: the engineers who design and develop driving delegation system uses the risk score of SafetyNex V2.1 as a feedback, and try to minimize it by successive tests.
. On-line: the risk score is used by the decision-making system to generate actions that lead to the lowest possible risk.
CONCLUSION
SafetyNex V2.1 is now available and NEXYAD is currently working on deployment opportunities worldwide at the beginning of 2016.
This module is unique and has a direct effect, if properly used, on road safety.
For more information: sales@nexyad.net
DEMO WITH SOUND IN URBAN TRAFFIC
Put the sound on for this demo with vocal explanations :
SafetyNex for Onboard Road Safety Measurement by NEXYAD
INTRODUCTION
Car manufacturers and insurance companies both need a system that would estimate in real time the risk taken by the driver.
Most commercial applications use to consider that a driver that do not accelerate much doesn’t take risk, and that a driver that drives more sporty is dangerous.
However, insurance companies statisticians could notice that there no correlation between the driving style and the accidents.
It is completely obvious : danger comes when the driving style is not adapted to the infrastructure. So driving style doesn’t has no meaning by itself.
NEXYAD company has been working since 1995 on onboard risk estimation, and recently launched their module SafetyNex that estimates a risk which is correlated (by construction) with accidents.
SafetyNex is the result of three collaborative French research programs :
. ARCOS
. SARI
. SERA
SafetyNex measures onboard the adequacy of driving style (and in particular the speed of the vehicle) with the characteristics of the infrastructure : adequacy of the current speed and initiated acceleration to the radii of curvature of bends downstream, to the presence of downstream crossings, or pedestrian crossings, … etc.
It is possible to add to SafetyNex optional inputs such as :
. weather report,
. maximum grip
. atmospheric visibility (rain, fog …)
. distance to obstacles (coming from an ADAS system) and in this case, we use not only infrastructure characteristics but also trafic flow information that describe the way other users move on the same infrastructure.
Similarly, can be integrated into SafetyNex data from characteristics of ADAS in order to measure the adequacy of these driver assistance systems to the situation experienced by the vehicle on the infrastructure.
For example, if the vehicle has radar or camera, the data of the opening angle enable SafetyNex (which read shape of the infrastructure from the onboard navigation map) to compute the distance of geometric visibility, not for the driver, but for embedded artificial perception systems.
EXAMPLE OF USE IN URBAN TRAFFIC
The example below shows the predictive nature of safetyNex : when you get in an intersection, it’s a little before that you must slow down because you can not know what is likely to emerge from this intersection. However, when one is in the intersection, it is not dangerous to re-accelerate. This is the way that safe drivers use to drive.
Therefore, the risk score is not correlated to the value of the deceleration or acceleration but to the adequacy of speed to potential dangers of the infrastructure. You may drive sporty or lazy and have the same good or bad safety score computed by SafetyNex.
Video with sound (spoken explanations)
CONCLUSION
SafetyNex is now available for sale and is operating in the following environments:
. Framework RT-MAPS PC : This version is for automakers researchers, scientists of tier one techno suppliers, statisticians and actuaries of insurance companies. It allows real-time replay, in order to see what areas make the risk climb, it also allows to correlate the new variable (risk) with all other variables available, and for car manufacturers, it lets develop ADAS based on this module.
RT-MAPS is interfaced with the Data Base Management Systems, which is convenient to apply SafetyNex on the company’s information systems.
. electronic device of an automotive tier one company : the announcement will be made soon by the automotive tier one techno supplier.
. mobile phones (December 2015), which will allow everyone to have this road safety module.
To know more : sales@nexyad.net
1) Known life situations
Indeed, the methodology AGENDA proposes to describe potential changes of signals and images came into factors of variability and their crosses.
Example, for obstacle detection :
. weather (dry overcast, sunny weather, rain, fog)
. overall brightness (low, medium, high)
. speed of the carrier vehicle (low, moderate, high)
. type of road (highway, road with marking, road without marking …)
. coating (bitumen 1, bitumen 2, …, cobblestones)
. day / night (headlights and the lights switched infrastructure)
. season (spring, summer, autumn, winter)
. etc …
> type of obstacle :
– stopped
. infrastructure-related: work terminals, tolls, …
. related users: tire on the road, parcel felt from a truck lying on the road, biker following a road accident, disabled vehicle stopped on the floor, standing pedestrian on roadside edge (dodger / no sniper)
– moving
. truck, car, vulnerable (pedestrian, bicycle, motorcycle) each with types trajectories (longitudinal
in rolling direction, longitudinally in the opposite direction of rolling side) and position (opposite
to right, left).
. Etc…
We see that if we cross these factors, we find fairly quickly a huge number of cases. However, the development of ADAS systems is complex, and it is necessary to proceed by successive iterations, starting from simple situations to move to complicated situations.
Our database allows this, since all records are described in terms of crossing the terms of the factors of variability. Thus knows exactly which cases were tested or not by the system.
Formalism ‘crossing of variability factors of the terms’ allows using design of experiments, and in particular orthogonal fractional plans to sharply reduce the number of cases to be tested while ensuring maximum coverage of life situations. One can in this context to develop a fractional ADAS on an orthogonal plan and test other hard fractional orthogonal planes for example.
2) Reality reference
This is to crop images barriers and infrastructure elements (markings, roadsides, etc.) so as to constitute a reference to measure system performance.
. Examples of life situations:
1.1, summer, overcast, unmarked road, moderate speed tire on the floor, dry weather
1.2, summer, overcast, unmarked road, moderate speed, parcels on the floor, dry weather
2.1, summer, overcast , unmarked road, moderate speed, standing pedestrians non ambush at the edges of the floor, dry weather
2.2, summer, overcast, unmarked road, moderate speed, lying on the floor human, dry weather
etc …
Not sure that you would meet those few cases, even with on million kilometers on open roads.
NEXYAD starts his collection of images and data:
. video (towards the front of the vehicle) Color
. accelerometers
. gyros
The files are synchronized by RT-MAPS tool INTEMPORA society.
The files are saved as RT-MAPS format and replayable directly by this tool.
NEXYAD currently looking for contributors on this internal project. Co contributors fund and in return free access to the database, unlimited in time. This contribution will accelerate the work of collecting and labeling.
NEXYAD wishes to provide this basis before June 2016, free way to give the material to the community and the ADAS autonomous vehicle for a smaller version of the database, and pay way (as subscriptions) for complete database.
NEXYAD’s ambition is to spread its methodological expertise and allow everyone to assess the performance of vision systems for ADAS, whether systems developed by NEXYAD, or others.
“Methodology for ADAS Validation: Potential Contribution of Other Scientific Fields Which Have Already Answered the Same Questions”, Gérard Yahiaoui, Pierre Da Silva Dias, CESA congress Dec 2014, Paris, proc. Springer Verlag
“Methods and tools for ADAS validation”, Gérard Yahiaoui, Nicolas du Lac, Safetyweek congress, May 2015, Aschaffenburg
For questions, or if you wish to become a contributor, please contact NEXYAD : +33 139041360
The company NEXYAD has been working on this issue for over 20 years without interruption, and has accumulated a large number of cases of road types, of coatings, in various atmospheric conditions.
This is to detect the rollable area on the road, without regard to, in a first step, lane markings.
Indeed, in Europe, there are many unmarked roads, and work on a marked road may change the markings and
make a « follow the markings strategy » dangerous.
In the images below you can see on the left a typical French countryside road with no markings, and on the right image, new markings was achieved while former markings still strongly visible.
These cases are quite common on our European roads and a driver assistance system, or a driving delegation
system, must at least understand such cases and if necessary tell the driver to cope with it by himself.
The NEXYAD road detection module, RoadNex V2.1 is a brick to go further to cope with these cases :
RoadNex V2.1 should be coupled with road signs detection, road markings detection, obstacle detection, in order to build an intelligent perception system. RoadNex is then a key module of such a system.
The road detection module NEXYAD, RoadNex V2.1 is available as a component into the asynchronous real time framework RT-MAPS : See HERE
SafetyNex is now running in RT-Maps by IMTEMPORA
SafetyNex is under fusion with Ecogyzer (eco driving rating system) : this « package » will be the ultimate tool for eco and safe driving combination.
SafetyNex v2.1
SafetyNex is a high level functional bloc (sofware) for ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) : onboard measurement of driving behaviour, taking into account map and GPS geolocation (shape of the road, crossing roads, … ahead), speed, accelerations, visibility, adherence, distance to obstacle, etc.
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Very soon on RT-Maps…
Here are the powerpoint sildes of presentation of NEXYAD Automotive & Transportation : PDF Here
– Visibility measurement in your lab (Testing Application : for wipers, washer, windshield, rain sensor, lighting, demist, …) VisiNex
– Onboard Software (Artificial Vision) blocs for your ADAS development : (road detection) RoadNex, (road safety assessment) SafetyNex, (drowsiness detection) DrowsiNex, (visibility measurement) VisiNex Onboard, (obstacle/pedestrian detection) ObstaNex
New releases of NEXYAD algorithms for ADAS :
RoadNex : detection of the road in front of vehicle for your ADAS
Link : https://nexyad.net/Automotive-Transportation/?page_id=412
ObstaNex : detection of obstacles/pedestrians in front of the vehicle for your ADAS
Link : https://nexyad.net/Automotive-Transportation/?page_id=429
VisiNex Onboard : measurement of visibility in front of the vehicle for your ADAS
Link : https://nexyad.net/Automotive-Transportation/?page_id=438
DrowsiNex : Detection of driver’s drowsiness for your ADAS
Link : https://nexyad.net/Automotive-Transportation/?page_id=423
SafetyNex : car safety/risk onboard estimation for your ADAS
Link : https://nexyad.net/Automotive-Transportation/?page_id=441
Those software blocs are available as user licences for research (autonomous vehicles and adas demo cars, …) as dll for windows or as RT-MAPS components.
NEXYAD also takes into account opportunities to embed those blocs into your ADAS systems for new vehicles or as after market solutions in your distribution network.
Review of the product SafetyNex of NEXYAD Automotive & Transportation (onboard safety estimation on a smart phone) in the blog VOITURE DU FUTUR (car of the future) : http://voituredufutur.blogspot.fr/2013/06/safetynex-la-future-application.html
SafetyNex is an embedded system integrated in the latest generation of mobile telephones using Android. SafetyNex has a continual accident risk assessment function (severe corners, obstacles, poor visibility due to bad weather conditions etc.)
More information HERE (PDF – French)
NEXYAD is involved in the collaborative research project RASSUR79 (competitive cluster moveo).
NEXYAD brings modules and knowledge on :
– Onboard road recognition
– Onboard visibility measurement
– Onboard accident risk assessment
The research and development work of NEXYAD in this program is helped by the Region Ile de France
Partners : CIVITEC, INTEMPORA, UMS-GAAS, UNILIM, UNIVERSITE RENNES 1, XLIM, VALEO
NEXYAD demonstrated a result of the research program MERIT at the members day of the Competitive Cluster Mov’eo :
onboard road recognition, visibility measurement, obstacle detection, and road safety level estimation … implanted into a 3G mobile phone (Android OS)