Mobileye's Mapless Speed Assistant

I had the first of two cataract surgeries this week.?It became necessary as I was having difficulty reading road signs.

For a day or two I was one-eyed.?I think I could almost get by with one eye, but I’d rather use two, which is why Mobileye’s ISA announcement caught my one eye.

Mobileye says it has the world’s first vision-only intelligent speed assist (ISA) solution.?ISA refers to the speed limit icon that appears in most cars’ instrument clusters to indicate the speed limit on the road on which a car is driving.

ISA solutions use a speed limit sign-recognition camera and/or map-based speed limit data to advise drivers of the current speed limit and can be used to automatically limit the speed of the vehicle if needed or desired. Widespread adoption of ISA technology was helped by Euro-NCAP (European New Car Assessment Program) which chose to add extra safety rating points for vehicles that include ISA.

The decision to adopt ISA in Europe occurred in 2019 which set off a rush among car makers to find and implement solutions to this automotive requirement.?No car company wanted to be caught with new cars that were not blessed with NCAP’s five-star safety rating.

Suppliers ranging from map providers HERE and TomTom to forward facing camera suppliers such as Veoneer and Mobileye rushed to fulfill the ISA requirement for car makers.?Car makers adopted a range of solutions – some integrated camera and map inputs, some chose map-only systems, and some focused on camera-centric approaches.

Solving the problem of identifying the applicable speed on any road segment at any time was more complex than it at first seemed.?It was made more challenging by the regulatory requirement of a minimum of 80% accuracy for each road type (highway, urban and rural roads) with the overall system performance needing to be correct 90% of the time.

In the end, map maker HERE won the lion’s share of the European new car programs.?TomTom won Hyundai and Kia.?Volvo opted for a Google-based solution.

The consequences of getting ISA wrong – in the short term – could be as severe as failing to meet the 90% accuracy threshold for a five-star safety rating from NCAP or as “trivial” as exposing a user to a speeding ticket.?Where ISA data might be used to support automated or semi-automated driving, the consequences could be catastrophic.

While HERE’s recommended solution combined camera, map, and other inputs along with software updates, no two car makers adopted the same approach.?Some car makers went so far as to build machine learning back-end systems to manage the ISA information.

The regulators and solution providers noted that 10% of all posted speed limits change on an annual basis.?Of course, speed limits vary by road type, time of day, by lane, and weather and can be impacted by construction.?HERE and TomTom led the way in ISA development because of the thousands of kilometers of roadway where speed limits are not marked and can only be inferred by the type of road or driving conditions.

Taking all of these factors into account, it is curious that Mobileye would be so reckless as to introduce a vision-only system.?Mobileye is actually in the business of building its own map, which only makes its mapless approach to ISA even more curious.

In its own defense, Mobileye says it has developed “several cutting-edge technologies” that updated the legacy traffic sign recognition technology to the ISA requirements including:

• Traffic sign relevancy?technology that identifies whether a speed sign is relevant to a specific lane,
• Signature-based classification?that loads the ‘signature’ of a new traffic sign to the vehicle, even for new signs that were introduced after the vehicle’s manufacture,
• OCR-based city entrance identification for European-style signs,
• Advanced search engines?that allow finding examples of rare signs in Mobileye’s clips database and integrate them into the system, and
• Road-type classifier?that can work out the right speed, even when traffic signs are missing, by using different cues in the scene to detect the road type.

Said a Mobileye executive: “Mobileye’s 400-petabyte database of driving footage, gathered from around the world, enables us to rapidly meet the growing requirements of automotive safety regulators with new software designed for our existing driver-assist platforms. After successfully surpassing?GSR ISA standards during stringent testing, we look forward to collaborating with automakers to implement this lifesaving technology in Europe and beyond.”

This statement clearly reveals Mobileye’s disingenuousness.?Mobileye may not be using a map but it does intend to use its “400Pb of driving footage.?That sounds a lot like a map equivalent to me.

More blatantly, though, Mobileye chose to illustrate and underline the credibility of its system and data strategy with an image showing a European pedestrian or living area sign.?The Mobileye ISA-equipped instrument cluster-mounted system (pictured above from Mobileye press materials) displays “20Kph.”?The actual speed limit in such an area is “walking speed” or 7Kph.

Mobileye says cars equipped with its mapless, vision-only ISA solution will begin shipping in Europe before the end of the year.?Given the fact that most programs have been locked up for the next seven years by HERE, TomTom, and Google it is most likely that Mobileye’s technology will be adopted by new market entrants, possibly from China.?It’s difficult to say for sure but just as I’d prefer to operate with both eyes open, I’d rather operate a car that is guided simultaneously by contextual data and its own camera.?Two sources of data (or more) are better than one in this case.