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We have many traffic accidents and related fatalities every year and safety issue is focused very much as well as environmental issue. As for frontal collision, some products of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) System and headway distance warning system have been developed and introduced to the market in Japan, U.S, and Europe. In the other hand, the systems to reduce side and rear collision, for example, which assist driver's maneuvers in lane change situation at high speed, are under development. And efforts to make restraint systems such as airbag and seat belt more effective is also needed in order to increase passive safety and reduce related fatalities, for example, smart airbag using additional sensors. Corresponding to these situations, we made a plan to develop short-range radars for these automotive applications, Blind Spot Detection System (BSD), Parking Aid System (PA), and Pre-crash Detection System (PC).

In JAPAN some ICCs (Intelligent Cruise Control systems) with recognition systems using Laser Radar have been produced since 1995. However these recognition systems have some improvement challenges; 1) Improvement of detectability for less reflective objects, 2) Improvement of identification performance of a vehicle to be tracked in the same lane (a target vehicle), 3) Improvement of detection performance under bad weather condition. We are developing a New Recognition System using sensitive Laser Radar with APD (Avalanche Photo Diode) as a solution for these challenges. In this paper, we will describe our experimental system using sensitive Laser Radar, especially, algorithm for target vehicle recognition and its performance.