Thermal cameras could be key to safer self-driving vehicles

Adasky wants to augment LiDAR with thermal cameras.

The typical self-driving prototype is outfitted with a barrage of sensors, from cameras to LiDAR and radar to ultrasonic sensors. All of these are watching the road, other vehicles, pedestrians and, frankly, anything that could disrupt a leisurely drive. But are all of these eyes on the roadway enough? Adasky doesn't think so.

The Israeli startup is only a few months old, but it's already built a thermal camera for a demo vehicle I had a chance to ride in. The device passively collects thermal data from the world, then converts it into a high-resolution video that the company drops into its computer-vision system. Then whatever it sees is classified as a car, person, animal, road and so on.

That's pretty much how other sensors work, too, but during the demo, it became clear that the system could see and classify items that could be difficult to parse with the typical cameras on an autonomous car. The in-car monitor showed and classified people and animals based on their thermal signature. Even if a system like this can't immediately determine something it sees is a person, the heat signature would at least show that it's probably alive.