Developing global standards for Automotive vision

Update: IEEE Standards Association, Project 2020: Automotive System Image Quality

As you may know, after many years organising events for this industry I am now Conference Director for AutoSens, which I am producing with valued support from Prof Patrick Denny of Valeo, Dr Sven Fleck of SmartSurv Vision Systems, Benjamin May of AMX13 and a number of other established professionals and of course my team at Sense Media.

I would hope that they all know my personal passion has always been to share the collective wisdom of experts, particularly scientists and engineers, to help resolve problems and advance technology, so it gives me great pleasure to update you on another element of this group’s collaboration: IEEE Standards Association (SA), Proposed Project 2020: Automotive System Image Quality.

We plan to establish a Workgroup under IEEE and I’m happy to report that this process has now begun. The Project Authorisation Request (PAR) has been submitted to the IEEE Standards Association and will be reviewed at their next NESCOM meeting in May.

While the Workgroup will not be formalised until after IEEE-SA Standards Board approval, I wanted to share this news so as part of the automotive sensor market, you can consider your involvement and plan accordingly. I am pleased to say I have already received messages of support from a number of OEM and Tier 1 companies in the ADAS space.

In summary:

• The aim is to develop standard approaches to aid development of automotive imaging technologies for all stakeholders
• The Workgroup will be made open to all interested parties for input
• All proposed standards will be voted on in a democratic way by registered IEEE-SA members
• More on the IEEE Standards Association here: https://standards.ieee.org/index.html
• This is a completely non-commercial activity and fully regulated by IEEE-SA

The Scope and Purpose of the proposed Workgroup are below for your reference.

I am the nominated Chair of the Workgroup during the application phase, as well as the current point of contact.  Once the creation of the Working Group has been approved by NESCOM, we will invite IEEE members to join the Workgroup and officer nominations for Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer will be voted upon in accordance to established IEEE protocols.

The full meeting schedule will be announced in due course, but pending IEEE-SA Standards Board approval of Project 2020, we will hold the first Annual Meeting in Brussels (immediately preceding the AutoSens conference) so please note in your diary if you would like to be involved.  Companies working in this sector may be represented by more than one person.

From the submitted PAR:

5.2 Scope: This standard addresses the fundamental attributes that contribute to image and quality for automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications, as well as identifying existing metrics and other useful information relating to these attributes. It defines a standardized suite of objective and subjective test methods for measuring automotive camera image quality attributes, and it specifies tools and test methods to facilitate standards-based communication and comparison among OEM and Tier 1 system integrators and component vendors regarding automotive ADAS image quality.

5.4 Purpose: This standard specifies methods and metrics for measuring and testing automotive image quality to ensure consistency and create cross-industry reference points.

This blog post is a slightly edited version of an email that I have already circulated to many professionals, so I hope that you may have already been sent a copy through a colleague but please bear in mind that we are at the very early stages.

So, this is, in part, an announcement of our intention, but also a request – for the senior engineers, researchers, innovators and scientists working in this sector to become involved in a long-term project to improve and codify an important part of the vehicular eco-system.

In order to help manage the meeting roster, please can you let me know if would like to stay informed about the Project 2020 activities, and if you would plan to attend the Annual Meeting in Brussels in September by sending an email to [email protected] along with any information about you, as well as your company’s interest in involvement with this important project.