Sanyo Electric Co, Japan announced the development of an automotive omni-directional monitor system that can display a bird’s eye view of the vehicle shot with four cameras. The cameras are mounted on four positions, namely front, rear, left and right sides, of the vehicle. The distortion of images are corrected by an image processor and converted into bird’s eye images before they are combined together. In order to provide a coherent view, Sanyo developed an algorithm to adjust the misalignment of the joint lines when the images are integrated. Sanyo also developed an automotive wireless camera system supporting the IEEE 802.11a/g wireless LAN communication standard. The camera system can transmit images with up to WVGA (720 x 480) resolution to an image processor at a transfer rate of 30 fps. Sanyo Electric aims at employing this camera system in the omni-directional monitor system in the future. With the adoption of the high-speed JPEG codec, the wireless camera system enables a low-delay transmission with a delay of 50ms or shorter.
The monitor system is intended for assisting drivers of large vehicles, such as truck, RV, etc to park or change the direction at an intersection. Sanyo Electric expects to use the camera system for the wireless transmission of images supplied from a rear camera for use in parking assistance, as well as images to be displayed on the screen installed for the rear seat.