Evaluating Forward Collision Warning and Autonomous Emergency Braking Systems in India Using Dashboard Cameras

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Road traffic fatalities in India have been increasing, reaching around 150,000 fatalities a year. To reduce fatalities, some prospective studies suggested using active safety technologies such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), and Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB). However, the effectiveness of FCW and AEB on Indian roads using retrospective studies is not known. Vehicle data such as radar, and controller area network signals could be used for the evaluation of the systems (FCW and AEB). However, these data are not readily accessible. This exploratory study aims to explore the opportunities and limitations of using simple dashboard cameras for a Field Operational Test. One European car with state-of-the-art FCW and AEB systems was rented. Fifteen drivers shared the vehicle, driving almost 10,000 km over 29 days. The vehicle was mounted with a set of dashboard cameras. The navigator noted the “system activated” events and “no activation” events in the logbook during the drive. Post completion of the driving activity, the system activated events: single event (only FCW) or combined event (FCW + AEB), and no activation events were analyzed. Three evaluators classified each system activated event as either a true positive or a false positive. Further, no activation events, where the driver felt the FCW should but did not activate, were classified as false negatives. A total of 79 single and combined events were identified. The AEB system produced 2.9 true positives and 0.2 false positives per 1000 km, while the FCW system produced 6.3 true positives and 2.1 false positives per 1000 km. For the FCW system, there were also 0.3 false negatives per 1000 km. The inter-rater reliability for the three evaluators was moderate indicating that not enough data is provided to accurately understand and classify the events. Reliable performance evaluation with the chosen simple approach seems highly challenging.</div></div>