"trends, challenges and opportunities in vision-based automotive safety and autonomous driving...

Copyright © 2015 CogniVue 1

Simon Morris/Tom Wilson CogniVue

12 May 2015

Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in

Vision-Based Automotive Safety and

Autonomous Driving Systems


Why ADAS & Autonomous Driving?

• Save lives, reduce injuries

3,500 people die every day from traffic related

accidents, 1.2 million + per year

50 million injured every year

• Give time back to driver

Average drive time in USA~ 1 hour


What is Vision-Based ADAS?

Courtesy of Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems


Why Vision for ADAS?

AUTONOMOUS EMERGENCY BRAKING TEST RESULTS Thatcham Research, 2013

Vision-based ADAS out-performed “vision-less”


• Fear sells cars—drivers/consumers are paying for improved safety from

rear cameras to collision avoidance

• New NHTSA and NCAP safety ratings also driving adoption

• ADAS is fastest growing segment in automotive electronics

• Higher-end ADAS not just in high-end vehicles

• April 2015: 2015 Toyota Auris, Hyundai Sonata

• Feb 2015: VW Touran

Trends: Growing use, 2015 Line-up….


1. Huge data processing and growing

2. Huge computational load and complex

3. Always-on, Low power

4. Highly safe & reliable

Challenges for ADAS Vision


• 4x growth in input pixel data bandwidth

30Mbytes/sec going to 120Mbytes/sec

• 10x growth in data processing demand, greater than 1.2Gbytes/sec

Multiple megapixel frames (stereo)

Multiple image pyramids (5x frame size)

Multiple intermediate results (5-10x frame size)

Multiple concurrent applications

Challenges: Massive Data Processing Demand


• Active safety requires high detection accuracy

• High detection accuracy = high algorithm complexity and high

computation load

• Multiple safety critical applications running concurrently:

Pedestrian Detection, Autonomous Emergency Braking, Collision

Avoidance, Advanced Cruise Control, Lane keep assist and warning,

Traffic Sign Recognition, High Beam control

• Proprietary and hand-crafted computer vision approaches

Emergence of Deep Learning: Convolutional Neural Networks

(CNN)

• Computational loading equivalent to >1 TeraFLOPs, super-computing

territory!

Challenges: Very High Computation Load


Challenges: Low Power!!

• ADAS Camera situated on windshield

Severe thermal design challenge

AEC-Q100 Grade 1 minimum (-40C to +125C)

Power budget < 5 Watts

• Vision based safety apps require 500-1000 GOPs/s/W!

• Intel i7-3720QM CPU, NVIDIA GT650m & GTX780 GPUs, power efficiency

~ 1-5 GOPs/s/W (Gokhale et al., 2014)

• Need ~100-200 x improvement in performance/watt over conventional

processor architectures

Continental ADAS System


Challenges: Safety & Reliability

• No room for error in critical safety systems

• Technology has to work 100% of the time

• ISO-26262 functional safety impacts all parts of chip, IP and software

development process. Not an after-thought.


• Large market with high growth

• 197M cameras in cars by 2020 (ABI Research Aug 2014)

• ADAS fastest growing segment in automotive electronics 2014-2018,

20% Strategic Analytics Apr 2014

• Vision processing challenge brings new players

• Mobileye—$140M revenue with >$10B market cap!

• CogniVue—APEX image cognition processor IP

Opportunities


• Mobileye has ~80% market share in vision based ADAS

Turn-key black-box solution

• Tier-1 combatants will need:

Major investment in vision application development

Optimized computer vision libraries

Extensive video test databases

New System-on-Chip vision processors (like Freescale S32V)

Specialized programmable vision processing cores like APEX that can

deliver big improvements in performance/watt

• Winners in ADAS will be strongly positioned to win in the autonomous

vehicle market

Opportunity… The Battle for ADAS


Summary

• The future of ADAS and autonomous driving rests on

advancements in embedded vision processing

• The ADAS market is in a pitched battle for market share

• High performance low power embedded vision cores will play

pivotal role in the ADAS battle

See demonstrations of APEX image cognition processor IP at the

Technology Showcase