Computer vision and highway automation

A survey is given on the development of machine vision for road vehicle guidance. Through early work in real-time simulation with real hardware in the loop at UBM, and through the EUREKA-project 'Prometheus' from 1987 to 1994 following the 100(th) anniversary of road vehicle developments since 1886, Europe has pioneered the field. Since first fully autonomous testdrives in 1986, and first participation in public traffic in 1992, considerable progress has been achieved. With continuous growth in computing power of microprocessors at a rate of about one order of magnitude every four to five years, sufficient performance levels for dynamic machine vision will be available within one or two decades. The principles of dynamic vision as developed at UBM and performance levels achieved are discussed.