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Driver safety continues to be improved by advances in active safety technologies. One important example is Lane Departure Warning (LDW). European regulators soon will require LDW in big cars to reduce traffic accidents and New Car Assessment Programs in various countries will include LDW in a few years. Our focus is on rear cameras as sensing devices to recognize lane markers. Rear cameras are the most prevalent cameras for outside monitoring, and new Kids and Cars legislation will make them obligatory in the United States from 2014. As an affordable sensing system, we envision a rear camera which will function both as a rear-view monitoring device for drivers and as an LDW sensing device. However, there is a great difficulty involved in using the rear camera: water-droplets and dirt are directly attached to the lens surface, creating bad lens condition.

We have developed a system for automatic deceleration upon entering curves to prevent collisions on tight curves on high-ways. The navigation system is used to determine safe speed negotiating the curve, defined as a speed that will keep lateral acceleration within a settled value. The navigation system sends the curve radius to a controller, which calculates the safe speed for the curve. The controller then sends the speed command to the ACC system, which adjusts the vehicle speed. One of the important features in this system is the estimation of the vehicle position, in terms of its distance from the curve entrance. Navigation systems have a certain amount of dispersion in positional accuracy. A front camera is used in our system to decrease this dispersion. This camera detects lane markers (white lines, raised pavement markers, etc.) using our line recognition technologies1).