Optical roadsign recognition to improve active safety features

With its constant concern to improve road safety P.S.A. Peugeot Citroen (France) wants to make progress on active safety by developing an autonomous system providing fast practical information to the driver. Recent advances in coupling liquid crystal spatial light modulators (SLMs) with silicon VLSI chips have opened new opportunities in optical parallel processing and computing. It is now possible to construct compact, reliable, and reconfigurable optical hardware for industrial use. We have chosen the task of road sign recognition, with emphasis on speed limit signs, to demonstrate the feasibility of such an optical processor which uses fast switching elements based on ferroelectric liquid crystal technology.© (1993) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.