Smart-Phone App Warns Pedestrians of Oncoming Cars
Researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of Bologna in Italy have developed an Android app that uses the camera on a smart phone to detect oncoming traffic.
The app relies on machine-learning and image-recognition algorithms to identify the fronts and backs of vehicles, and takes into account varying light conditions, phone tilt, and blur. When WalkSafe detects a car approaching at 30 miles per hour or faster, it vibrates the phone and makes a sound to alert the distracted user.
Andrew Campbell, professor of computer science at Dartmouth and head of the Smartphone Sensing Group, says the app also exploits phone APIs to only run the vehicle-detection algorithm during active calls, saving the phone’s battery.
Using a Nexus One phone, the researchers show that WalkSafe could reliably detect oncoming cars as far as 50 meters away from pedestrians (see the video above). They now plan to speed up the recognition algorithm to improve the app.
Now all we need is a system to alert people who text and walk.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.