SBIR Phase I: A Passive Alternative to LiDAR for Automotive 3D Ranging

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will advance the development of detection systems for autonomous vehicles. The proposed technology takes advantage of trends in price, performance, and quality of imagers and processors driven by the proliferation of these devices in smartphones. The technologyalso provides key capabilities such as integrated color information, detection over extended depths, scene segmentation and tracking, and better performance in inclement weather or under poor visibility. This leads to improvements in three-dimensional (3D) vision and object modeling that will have significant commercial impact in accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle navigation and assistance. This will lead to higher commuting efficiency, reduced traffic fatalities, reduced traffic congestion, and reduced pollution. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the technical capabilities and advantages of passive sensing image-based multi-camera EPI Epipolar-Plane Imaging (EPI) analysis for autonomous vehicle (AV) ranging. The research objective is to advance the development of EPI analysis and compare it to Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems. The research will extend an existing EPI-based module to incorporate new hardware and software to achieve these results, including accuracy and precision comparable to LiDAR at distances of 200 m and beyond, feature discernment superior to LiDAR, higher levels of semantics in presented range information, and operation in inclement weather and discrete obscuration. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.