TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) announced today that it has given its Pre-crash Safety System the ability to determine—as a world’s first1—whether a driver’s eyes are properly open. TMC expects this driver-monitoring breakthrough, along with the system’s current ability to determine the direction of the driver’s face, to play an important role in reducing collision-related damage.
The eye-monitoring feature, which is to be offered in vehicle models scheduled for launch in Japan in the near future, uses a driver-monitoring camera and image-processing computer to determine the position of the driver’s upper and lower eyelids. If the Pre-crash Safety System senses that a collision is imminent and also determines that the driver’s eyes are not properly open—or, by using the hitherto face-monitoring feature, determines that the driver is not facing forward—it issues a warning to the driver earlier than it would without such driver-condition information.
TMC believes that the development of driver-condition evaluation technologies is vital to improving overall vehicle safety performance, as driver condition is seen as a key factor in traffic safety, with driver error being the main cause of traffic accidents2. TMC is, thus, committed to continuing development of such technologies and to further enhancing its Pre-crash Safety System and other safety technologies.
As a part of its efforts to realize sustainable mobility, TMC intends to strengthen its traffic safety initiatives in the future through:
1) the development of even safer vehicles and technologies based on TMC’s Integrated Safety Management Concept3,
2) participation in the creation of a safe traffic environment and
3) activities designed to educate people in traffic safety, thereby contributing to the complete elimination of traffic casualties, which can be viewed as the ultimate hope of a society that values mobility.
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