NC State has developed computer vision programs that can keep a car in a lane on a highway. Dr. Wesley Snyder says they have gone even farther, "our program maintains an awareness of multiple lanes and traffic in those lanes.” (See the NC State Newsroom article linked in the title for more details)
How will traffic look in five to ten years if most of the cars we encounter on the road have such "auto pilot" controls or safety systems? I was tempted to think in idyllic terms, but I'm not so sure. To many drivers out there want to be ahead of everyone else. We see them passing the queue in the exit lane only to signal and squeeze/merge in at the last minutes just to be a few car lengths ahead of where they were before. I'm often tempted to write a traffic simulation. Then I think about what behavior I would need to model to make it a good predictor of actual traffic patterns. It always comes down to observing that lawfulness is inversely related to a selfishness or "self-importance" factor.
My computer traffic model dreams are almost always sparked by an interchange or intersection that seems to be poorly designed. Occasionally it is a tangent to answering how we as a driving community can exert social pressure upon badly behaved drivers to make them conform to driving laws and courtesy. Ah, a proverbial "tail-pipe" dream. Yes, sucking in the exhaust from the big belching behemoths called SUV's may contribute to these fanciful cogitations of cordial commuters.
Okay, NC State University, here is my challenge to you. Build a computer vision program that recognizes the cars and their license plates, combine it with observing the speed and noting unsafe driving actions of the other vehicles and add wireless Internet access to post these driving statistics to twitter. Then we can enjoy driving again as our cars with your computer vision identify hazardous drivers and give us a heads up display. It only needs one graphic, like the yellow first down line for football, just project the clearly visible words "stupid driver" onto the cars that have logged bad behaviors in twitter.
Then again perhaps yellow is not the best choice in this pine pollen drenched state.
--Jack
