Cars Should Read Road Signs

Your car may soon be able to read road signs better than you can. The “Traffic Sign Recognition and Lane Departure Warning” developed by GM scans the road ahead of you at a speed of 30 frames per second and can not only read road signs but also tell when your car drifts away from the lane. Here’s a bit more technical info from the Wired.com article “All-Seeing Car Reads Road Signs For You”:

The system uses two processors and a camera — called, appropriately, the Front Camera System — mounted near the rear-view mirror. One processor identifies familiar shapes, symbols and digits on common road signs and conveys the information to the driver via a digital display in the gauge cluster. The other alerts the driver when he or she strays from the lane.

While the current system only presents information to the driver, it doesn’t seem to far-fetched to think this technology could be used to alert an autonomously-driven car to changing speed limits or upcoming curves.