Nighttime is a critical weakness in vehicle safety since it is when drivers, pedestrians, and passengers are most vulnerable. A disproportionate number of fatal road injuries occur after dark, but SWIR has the potential to lower those statistics by enabling vision where the human eye or standard visible cameras fail.

Nocturnal Driving Risks

Today, driver assistance systems are not functional at night and in times of reduced visibility. In that matter, a recent AAA study revealed that none of the systems were able to detect an adult pedestrian crossing in front of a vehicle at night when testing automated emergency brake systems with pedestrian detection. A frightening revelation considering that according to NHTSA, despite 25% of travel in the United States occurs at night, almost half (49%) of road fatalities occur during this time, making nocturnal driving twice as dangerous as daytime driving. Additionally, the statistics show that 75% of pedestrian fatalities occurred after dark.

The majority of car accidents occur after dark because nighttime driving presents a unique set of dangers. At night, a visible camera, just like a human driver, has difficulty recognizing objects, people, animals, and other vehicles. This drastically limits the car’s vision to the narrow area that is illuminated by its headlights. However, a SWIR camera can achieve hundreds of meters of visibility in the dark and therefore offers effective night vision capabilities, greatly lowering the risk of collision. This capability has already been harnessed for decades by defense and aerospace industries to see at night. 

As shown in the image below, while operating in the dark a visible camera struggles to detect objects because of the lack of photons in low light. But due to a phenomenon called ambient starlight— or night glow— SWIR is naturally emitted into the sphere, allowing these cameras to support superior nighttime imaging. Even in conditions where nightglow is not sufficient, SWIR can be coupled with a SWIR illuminator which can emit three orders of magnitude more optical power than a visible illuminator and still be considered eye-safe.

Enhanced Night Vision

TriEye’s innovative camera is able to produce low-cost SWIR imaging of the driving scene. Delivering high-resolution image data at nighttime when visible cameras fail, TriEye’s technology allows for safer and more reliable ADAS in low visibility conditions, better mapping of the car surroundings, and a higher object detection rate. This enables ADAS applications such as emergency braking systems and lane-keeping assist to operate consistently, offering excellent visibility regardless of the time of day.