App adds top-spec tech to your car

You won’t need to shell out top-shelf money to get top-spec technology like fatigue monitoring, lane-wandering alerts and rear-end collision avoidance. A coming smartphone app will add them to any old clunker. 

Those high-spec high-tech features are largely seen only in premium and top-spec cars, but you'll soon be able to add them to your car with the CarSafe smartphone app.

Developed by a team at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, the app uses the smartphone’s front and rear cameras to monitor road and driver and raise the alarm if lane wandering, tailgating or eye drooping are detected.

The phone is mounted on the windscreen with one camera keeping its digital eye on the driver and the other watching the road, monitoring distance to the car ahead and ysynching with a navigation app to check the car is on track. 

“CarSafe uses advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms on the phone to process real-time video from the front and back cameras,” says Professor Andrew Campbell, the experimental computer scientist who leads Dartmouth’s Smartphone Sensing Group.

“The front camera tracks the driver’s head position and direction as well as eyes and blinking rate as indicators of microsleep, drowsiness, and distraction.” If the app detects danger signs lane weaving or tailgating, the phone sounds an alarm – and if it suspects sleepiness, it flashes up a coffee cup icon on its screen.

Campbell says the team had to develop a process to get two smartphone cameras to work together quickly enough to both be almost constant in operation. “One of the breakthroughs the team made was … coming up with fast camera switching techniques to process each camera’s video in real-time,” Campbell says. The team plans to release the app early in 2013 after further testing and evaluation.