intelligent automatic high beam light controllerfaculty.yu.edu.jo/alsumady/lists/published...

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J. of Active and Passive Electronic Devices, Vol. 00, pp. 1–8Reprints available directly from the publisherPhotocopying permitted by license only

©2013 Old City Publishing, Inc.Published by license under the OCP Science imprint,

a member of the Old City Publishing Group

Intelligent Automatic High Beam Light Controller

MohaMMed alsuMady and shadi. a. alboon*

Hijjawi Faculty for Engineering Technology, Electronics Engineering Department, Yarmouk University, Irbid, 21163, Jordan

E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]

In order to make the driving at night time a safe experience and more friendly to the other drivers on the road an automatic high beam light controller is needed. This paper presents, a simple, low cost and easy to install, design for an intelligent automatic on/off high beam light control-ler. The proposed design was implemented using the required hardware and components. The experimental results show that the controller pro-vides the driver with the required automatic control; by turning on and off the high beam light when facing other drivers. Moreover, the system will turn off the high beam light if there is enough lighting on the surrounding environment such as when driving inside cities.

Keywords: Automotive engineering, High beam light, Intelligent controller, Automatic On/Off controller.

1. INTRODUCTION

Car accidents data shows that the rate of night time accidents is higher than that for the day time [1]. This fact may be endorsed to number of parameters, among them, is the poor lighting conditions at night that reduce the visual capability of the driver. For that reason it is harder at night to see the road environment parameters such as warnings, cars, pedestrians and traffic signs. At night it is very difficult to determine the nature of objects by human eye from long distance. This due to the fact that night time diminishes the advan-tages of the colors and contrasts of objects.

*Corresponding author: [email protected]

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2 MohaMMed alsuMady and shadi. a. alboon

Hence, all vehicles are equipped with a headlight system to grant a safe lighting for night time driving or at any other situation. Usually the head-light system contains two reflector lamps the low beam and high beam lights. Typically the driver manually switches between the low and high beams. The high beam lights provide better visibility range over the low beam light. Nevertheless, the high beam lights generate a dazzling effect on the other driver that encounters it. Thus, the drivers must toggle from high beam to low beam lights in order to circumvent dazzling other drivers moving in the opposite way. On the other hand low beam lights create less dazzling effect, but with a reduction of quality and range of visibility.

Although using the high beam provides more safety margin, drivers use the high beams much less frequently than they need or can [2]. Even if the use of high beam is justified, drivers only use it about 25% of the total required time [3]. The two major reasons for this behavior are the manual nature of switching between the high and low beam. The second reason is the fear of dazzling other drivers and therefore causes catastrophic accidents. Therefore, an automatic controller to switch off the high beam lights when facing other vehicle is considered necessary. Such feature will make the driving experi-ence more convenient in the night time. Moreover, it makes the road more friendly to the other drivers on the road.

Lately high beam light controllers have been discussed in literature. Most of the proposed system are based on complex combination of cameras and image processing techniques in order to detect the vehicles and control the high beam light [4]-[8]. In [4] an image sensor is used to have picture of the road and then a classifier based module is used to identify the targets. While the authors of [5] used a multiple target classifier in order to classify vehicles and other objects. An input from a forward looking video camera combined with an automated learning algorithm was used to control the high beam light [6]. An intelligent headlight control (IHC) using support vector machine learning engine is discussed in [7]. Moreover, a simulation environment to test the headlight system to find its performance for different conditions is presented by [8]. Furthermore, there are different commercial systems for high beam light controllers, for instance Mobileye [9] and Conti [10], they installed in some vehicles brands. One of the early deployed systems is Gen-tex [11], which use a tiny imaging array with separate lenses and receptor arrays.

The aim of this research is to design a simple and yet intelligent control unit to automatically switching Off/On the high light beam considering the incoming traffic and the available lighting on the road especially inside cities. This control unit can be mounted to all vehicles to insure the high beam switching depending on the light density without the influence of the user (the driver). The novelty of the proposed design resembles in the simple and low cost system with effective results.

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intelligent autoMatic high beaM light controller 3

The rest of the paper is organized as follow: section 2 presents the system concept and design. In section 3 the experimental results are discussed. Finally section four discuses the conclusions.

2. SYSTEM CONCEPT AND DESIGN

The concept of the system basically can be divided into two parts: the light detection and the high beam off/on control circuit. Figure 1 shows the flow chart of the system operation concept. In order to design a simple low cost control system, a simple approach is needed to detect the light of the incom-ing traffic or the ambient lights in the road.

A light dependant resistor (LDR) is used (some literature refers to it as photoresistor) as a light sensor. The resistance value of the LDR is changing according to the impinging light on it. Typical LDR has a linear relation with the incident light such that if the light density is increased the resistance of the LDR is decreased [12]. Other electronic components such as a transistor,

FIGURE 1System concept flow chart.

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operational amplifier (used as comparator), relay, diodes and resistor are used to build the electronic control circuit as shown in figure 2. Detailed analysis for the circuit shown in figure 2 can be found in many electronic circuits books [13]. This can be discussed briefly as following: when the resistance of the LDR changed by the incident light or the ambient light; the comparator output will be either high or low depending the value of the LDR resistance as shown by the following equation:

VxR LDR

R LDR KV=

+

×_

_ 15012

If Vx V> 6 2. then the comparator output is high, Transistor on, relay is on and the high beam light is on. On the other hand if Vx V< 6 2. then the compara-tor output is low, Transistor off, relay is off and the high beam light is off. The value of the 150 KΩ variable resistor can be adjusted to increase or decrease sensitivity. Consequently, increases or decreases the action distance. It can be easily shown that the value of the LDR resistance that just make the high beam light on is when Vx V= 6 2. therefore the value of R_LDR is 160 KΩ.

3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In order to verify the design shown in figure 2, the system is implemented using the required components as shown in figure 3. It can be seen that the circuit is installed on a bread board for the preliminary tests. The circuit is then installed on a real life test drive at night time. The performance results of the system are shown in table 1.

FIGURE 2The proposed system schematic diagram.

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The table shows that as the incoming car distance from the test car decreases, the luminance of the incoming light is increasing and the LDR resistance decreases. It can easily seen from the table that the relation between the incoming light an LDR resistance is linear as stated before. It is notewor-thy to mention that the high beam light on the test car is turned off when the incoming car was about 230 m away.

Using this observation with the data from table 1 it can be seen that the LDR resistance is between 100 KΩ - 180 KΩ. This agrees with the calcula-tions done in the pervious section were the calculated threshold value for LDR resistance was 160 KΩ. The difference between the experimental and theoretical resistance value may be attributed to the tolerances of the compo-nents used in the circuit.

The following figures 4–7 show the experimental results for the system and the measured values of the LDR resistance values at different distances. Figure 4 shows the relationship between the incoming light luminance and

FIGURE 3The experimental implemented test circuit.

TAbLE 1The experimental test results for the high beam light controller

Distance (Meter) Luminance (Lux) R (Ω) Notes

300 25 180K

200 50 100K

150 100 50K

100 400 10K Like sunrise on clear day

50 3000 1K

25 12000 100 Like full day light

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distance from the test car. While figure 5 shows the relation between the LDR resistance and the distance between the two cars. From figure 5, we can see at about 230 m distance the measured value of the LDR resistance is about 125 KΩ. The relation between the LDR resistance and the incoming light luminance is shown in figure 6. both the light luminance and the LDR resis-tance relations with two cars distance are plotted on figure 7.

FIGURE 4The relation between the incoming light luminance and the distance.

FIGURE 5The relation between the LDR resistance and the distance.

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FIGURE 6The relation between the LDR resistance and the incoming light luminance.

FIGURE 7The relation between both the incoming light luminance and the LDR resistance with the Distance.

4. CONCLUSIONS

We have presented a simple, low cost and easy to install design for an intel-ligent automatic on/off controller for the high beam light. This system will

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provide the driver with a stress free driving experience at night time. The proposed automatic on/off controller will turn off the high beam light when it detects an incoming car lights. Therefore, the driver will be no more afraid of dazzling other drivers when he uses the high beam light when he needs it. The system was built and tested on a real car driving at night time. The experi-mental results show that the system can detects an incoming car lights from about 230 m away. This distance will provide a safety margin from being dazzling other drivers and easily can be adjusted. Moreover, the system turn off the high beam light when there is enough lighting on the road such as inside cities and fully lighted roads.

REFERENCES

[1] White Paper. (2000). Traffic safety facts, U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis-tration.

[2] J. Sullivan, G. Adachi, M. Mefford, and M. Flannagan. (2003). High-beam Headlamp Usage on Unlighted Rural Roadways, UMTRI report 2003-2.

[3] White Paper. (2006). Use of high-beam headlamps, Transportation Research Institute, Michigan University.

[4] A. Lopez, J. Hilgenstock, A .busse, R. baldrich, F Lumbreras and J. Serrat. (2008). Night-time vehicle detection for intelligent headlight control, in: Proc. of 10th Int. Conf. on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (ACIVS’08), Springer-Verlag, pp. 113–124.

[5] J. C. Rubio, J. Serrat, A. M. Lopez and D. Ponsa. (2010). Multiple target tracking for intel-ligent headlights control, 13th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transporta-tion Systems (ITSC), pp. 903-910.

[6] J. H. Connell, b. W. Herta, H. Hess and S. Pliefke. (2011).A Fast and Robust Intelligent Headlight Controller for Vehicles, 2011 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), pp. 703-708.

[7] Y. Li and S. Pankanti. (2011). A Performance Study of An Intelligent Headlight Control System, IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pp. 440-447.

[8] M. Tideman and S. J. Janssen. (2010). A Simulation Environment for Developing Intelli-gent Headlight Systems, 2010 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), pp. 225-231.

[9] G. Stein, O. Hadassi, N. Haim and U. Wolfovitz. (2009). “Headlight, taillight, and street-light detection”, US Patent 7, 566, 851.

[10] Continental, “Intelligent Headlamp Control”, http://www.contionline.com/[11] J. Stam, J. bechtel, S. Reese, J. Roberts, W. Tonar and b. Poe. (2005). “Vehicle Lamp

Control”, US patent 6, 947, 577.[12] b. P. Singh and R. Singh. (2006). Electronic Devices and Integrated Circuits, Pearson

Education India.[13] D. A. Neamen. (2009). Microelectronics: Circuit Analysis and Design (4th edition),

McGraw-Hill.

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