New Headlights Help Drivers See Better During Heavy Rains At Night

Those of us who drive at night will know how difficult it gets when rains starts to pour or a snowfall happens. Eyes have to be strained to see through the rain with glaring headlights. This is due to the white-out effect that happens when light meets heavy downpour. To solve this problem, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have devised a new headlight that detects and tracks every single rain drop or snow as it falls through the car’s headlight beams. Their system uses a digital projector to illuminate the raindrops for a few milliseconds and a camera mounted on the side of the projector tracks their positions and trajectories. A software calculates the path of raindrops and sends a signal to the headlights so that they dis-illuminate the shining by adjusting the headlight beams to only shine around them rather than on them.

A car with these headlights will be a boon for those who drive with obscured vision in heavy rainfall regions.

#-Link-Snipped-#
A novel headlight system reduces glare (left) by selectively reducing the amount of available light from a headlight (right) causing the glare.

The accuracy of the system is said to be such that it removes 70% of the rain from view if the car is running at approx. 18 miles per hour. But if the speed is increased to 60 miles per hour,  the accuracy becomes only 15 or 20 percent, which we think is great than none at all. The next step for researchers is to make sure these new smart headlights work on turns in curvy roads.

Via: #-Link-Snipped-#