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Greater Safety at Work:
Advanced Driver-Assistance System with Embedded Vision

Recognize workwear, protect people

The challenge: avoiding blind spots

Mining, construction sites or logistics: Heavy machinery and special vehicles often have huge blind spots that are difficult or impossible for the driver to see. At the same time, accidents involving people must be avoided at all costs. For this purpose, Retenua was looking for a solution to be mounted on vehicles.

The solution: Recognize high-vis vests

The result is emitrace®, the first advanced driver assistance system that recognizes people by means of reflective workwear. Due to embedded vision, it operates autonomously and is particularly compact and fail-safe. It can also be coupled directly with a vehicle control system.

emitrace from Retenua

The emitrace® driver assistance system from Retenua detects people in the blind spot and stops the vehicle directly if necessary.

NIR 3D people detection
with Embedded Vision

A method developed and patented by Retenua for detecting retroreflectors - the reflective stripes on high-vis vests and protective workwear - is the basis of emitrace®. The advanced driver assistance system consists of a sensor and computer unit that is usually mounted on the rear of industrial vehicles. An optoacoustic signaling device is located in the driver's cab; no other units are required. The embedded vision system integrated into the rear unit detects reflectors, calculates the 3D position and speed of people from the stereo images and triggers an alarm in the cabin if there is a risk of an accident. The powerful NIR (near infrared) flash allows short exposure times and a stable detection performance independent of the ambient lighting and with minimal influence of the infrared radiation on the environment. It is also possible to couple emitrace® directly into the vehicle control system so that automatic braking can be triggered.

Developed in close cooperation between research and industry

Rafael Mosberger and Henrik Andreasson, who were researching people detection for industrial vehicles at the University of Örebro in Sweden, developed a method for detecting retroreflectors using an infrared camera. In addition to EU funding, industrial companies also supported the project, which is how Retenua emerged as a start-up from research in 2015. In close cooperation with automotive manufacturers and their design departments, emitrace® was further developed into a plug-and-play standard product with preset parameters. The product, which is now available, is designed for easy retrofit on mobile machines and for maintenance-free operation, and has been successfully tested in the field. Retenua's C++ vision library and the provided API allow flexible integration into different software environments. Thus, the raw data and image processing results can also be transferred to other systems for further processing or documentation.

Key Facts

Technology

Patented NIR 3D people detection

Challenge

Real time stereo vision

VC Vision Solution

VC-Z ARM Stereo Camera

Easy and fast development with the VC-Z embedded stereo camera

"The automotive industry prefers compact sensors that can be installed quickly and easily," says Rafael Mosberger, Managing Director of Retenua. For the emitrace® advanced driver assistance system, the company relies on the embedded stereo cameras of the VC-Z series.

The board camera with two remote sensor boards is robust, easy to integrate and offers a Xilinx® Zynq® SoC with a powerful dual-core ARM® processor that performs all image data processing. A flash trigger and a 1 Gbit Ethernet interface provide optimal connectivity.
The Linux operating system and VC software libraries further reduced the development effort: "This is an enormous advantage for us because we could start developing applications immediately," says Rafael Mosberger.

About the VC-Z camera series

„To bring such a product to market successfully is a difficult undertaking as a start-up company. Vision Components helped us with important support for the product design which lead to reduced development time."

Rafael Mosberger - CEO of Retenua ABCEO of Retenua AB

About Retenua AB

Retenua AB is a product development and tech consulting company from Örebro, Sweden. With a strong technological background in sensors, computer vision, machine learn-ing, AI and robotics, Retenua is striving to-wards the most efficient technology transfer from state-of-the-art research to real-world industrial machine vision and robotics ap-plications. Founded in 2015, as a result from a research project on person detec-tion with industrial vehicles, the company moved into a new building in 2019.

Advanced driver assistance system for per-son detection

Recognize workwear, protect people

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