汽车初级英语03-Clever Cars Can Read Road Signs

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汽车初级英语03-Clever Cars Can Read Road Signs
                          Clever Cars Can Read Road Signs
  The plaintive plea to the traffic cop is the same the world over: “Sorry officer, I didn’t know I was speeding”. But drivers may soon have to come up with a better excuse. A new electronic driver’s assistant will detect road signs and warm drivers not to ignore them.
  The Australian invention is part of a global effort to make drivers more aware of road signs, especially those concerned with safety. Eventually, GPS-based systems could entirely replace road signs, but until then, ideas like the new driver assistance system (DAS) developed at the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) lab in Canberra may help.
  DAS uses three cameras: one to scan the road ahead and a pair to monitor where the driver is looking. The road camera is mounted on the rear view mirror and a “gaze monitoring” pair are set on either side of the instrument panel on the dashboard.
  Images from the cameras are fed to a computer system fitted behind the dash. Software on the PC detects road signs and works out where the driver is looking. The speedometer is also connected to the computer, so the system always knows how fast the car is traveling.
  The software scans the video pictures and detects road signs by recognizing their symmetrical shapes: rectangles, diamonds or circles. Once a sign is detected, the image is compared to a list of signs stored in the computer’s memory. If it recognizes a stop sign, the computer checks if the car is slowing down.
  The computer uses a commercial package called Face Lab to analyze images from the stereoscopic cameras and work out where the driver is looking. If the driver appears not to have seen a sign, and the car’s speed does not change, an alert is issued, says Nick Barnes, one of the developers at NICTA.
  NICTA’s team will tell the International Comference on Intelligent Robotic Systems in Sendai, Japan, this week that in preliminary tests DAS performed “pretty well” even at high speeds. Full-scale road trials, due to begin soon, will test the system with many more types of road signs.
  Former NICTA team member Gareth Loy, who is now at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, says sign detection is a tough engineering problem. Previous approaches have tried sensing the color patterns in signs.
  But varying lighting conditions make this difficult. NICTA’s “symmetry seeker” makes detection easier in a cluttered scene regardless of the lighting, he claims.
  However, there is a danger that sign detection could become annoying, warns Andrew Howard, head of road safety for the UK’s Automobile Association, especially on routes where the driver is familiar with the signs. Barnes agrees but says the system will not alert the driver if they do not look at a sign, only if they ignore the limit.
  He predicts that working systems will have overrides or variable sensitivity. “It would be possible to set the system to be a little more tolerant of driving slightly over the speed limit”. He says.

关于汽车初级英语"Clever Cars Can Read Road Signs"（聪明的汽车能识别路标）的探讨：

作为一名汽车工程师，我理解该标题意在讨论现代智能汽车技术的新发展。实际上，随着汽车智能化和自动驾驶技术的不断进步，许多先进的车辆已经具备了读取路标的能力。通过集成先进的摄像头和机器学习算法，现代智能汽车可以实时识别道路上的各种交通标志，并为驾驶员或自动驾驶系统提供准确的信息。这极大地提高了行车安全性并推动了自动驾驶技术的发展。