Detecting, tracking, and warning of traffic threats to police stopped along the roadside

Despite years of research into improving the safety of police roadside stops, reckless drivers continue to injure or kill police personnel stopped on the roadside at an alarming rate. We have proposed to reduce this problem through a "divert and alert" approach, projecting lasers onto the road surface as virtual flares to divert incoming vehicles, and alerting officers of dangerous incoming vehicles early enough to take life-saving evasive action. This thesis describes the initial development of the Officer Alerting Mechanism (OAM), which uses cameras to detect and track incoming vehicles, and calculates their real-world positions and trajectories. It presents a procedure for calibrating the camera software system with the laser, as well as a system that allows an officer to draw an arbitrary laser pattern on the screen that is then projected onto the road. Trajectories violating the "no-go" zone of the projected laser pattern are detected and the officer is accordingly alerted of a potentially dangerous vehicle.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Karraker, James (James D.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Seth Teller.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/85429

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/85429