AlexOliviaAudrey

Introduction

Typically, projects involved with autonomous driving or assisted driving often use simulation to perform testing before bringing it into the real-world. For example, lane keeping and pedestrian detection rely heavily on cameras and headlights which are first simulated to ensure feasibility and test capability before being implemented in real world situations. Therefore, ensuring that a simulation can accurately represent the real world and get accurate 3D spectral radiance scenes is important, and is also challenging.

One motivation for our project was that there was a recent tragedy where Google Maps led a father to drive off the end of a broken bridge. This tragedy could possibly have been avoided if the father could see with brighter or more properly aligned headlights. Thus, we want to further research and simulation calibration to ensure that simulated headlights are more representative of real-world situations. And, maybe in the future, this step can help ensure that headlights will adhere to a regulatory compliance standard, are more energy efficient, and we could ensure that headlights are more standardized.

For our project, we wanted to calibrate the ISET simulation to have more accurate beam patterns for different headlight patterns. With our project, we used computer graphics (PBRT) and MATLAB to evaluate camera and headlight design options when used with industry standard benchmark scenarios.