World’s leading electric car manufacturer, BYD (Build Your Dreams)files around 30 to 45 patents every single working day. These patents vary across multiple genres of technology and designs. One of BYD’s latest patents reveal an unusual engineering direction and perspective of vehicular ownership.
The latest patents concentrate on detecting alerting the drivers about living organisms present under the car during vehicle start process. These could include dogs, cats, monkeys or any other animals or birds for that matter. This introduces a certain moral compass towards nature into vehicle ownership.
BYD Patents Animal, Bird Detection Under The Car
There are times when animals like dogs and cats rest under a vehicle to protect themselves from heat and humidity or rain or snowfall. However, often times they go unnoticed by the car users who might start the car and drive away, without realising about the animals or birds beneath their cars.
This could vastly harm those organisms and even lead to casualties. To avoid these situations, BYD is working on an imaging system that will try and detect living organisms under the car’s body. BYD is using computer vision technologies to capture images of the car’s underbody every time it is powered down after a drive.
These images are stored onboard as reference points and every time the car is powered on real-time images are compared with these reference images. During the comparison, advanced computation kicks in and these images are deeply analysed to identify newly detected objects or any movements beneath the car.
When movement or animals are detected, the status is then portrayed to car users and they will be alerted accordingly. This imaging system is said to be capable of discarding static components and only detecting newly found objects, animals or birds when compared to the reference images.
How does it work?
Mapping and imaging a car’s underbody can be challenging owing to bad lighting, confusing shadows, varying road debris and dirt accumulation and even varying road surfaces. Harmless environmental changes like road debris and dirt have to be distinguished from genuine presence of animals or birds (or living organisms).
BYD seems to be employing a two-stage detection system where it first identifies harmless environmental changes and then applies those findings and then applies recognition algorithms to detect said targets (animals, birds, living beings, etc).
