New Automotive Bulb Camera Enables Massive Data Collection

A Berlin-based start-up has a new take on automotive light bulbs— one that goes beyond shining a light on the road ahead to now capturing vast quantities of data.

The company is autoaid and it is debuting its patent pending Automotive Bulb Camera at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show.

Here’s what’s cool: The simple camera system, which can be retrofitted to virtually any car, is able to collect and analyze huge quantities of video data from real traffic events. This data is essential for the further development of autonomous driving. When using the new vehicle lamp, drivers also benefit from cutting edge assistance systems.

From the large automobile manufacturers through the tech corporations to the automotive start-ups few future-related topics are given as much attention in the automotive industry as autonomous driving. However, before the development can be advanced to the stage where driving is fully autonomous, huge quantities of video material of traffic events are needed to enable the autonomous driving systems to be appropriately trained. To solve this challenge the new camera from autoaid comes into play.

The autoaid Automotive Bulb Camera is a high-resolution camera which is integrated into a halogen or LED automotive lamp and is used in conventional car headlight lampholders (e.g H7 or H4).

The system works quite simply on a plug-and-play basis. Further adaptation of the car for the purpose of retrofitting is not necessary. The original visual appearance of the vehicle is not altered. As a further component of autoaid’s new telematics platform, the cameras record all traffic events and send them, coupled with the real driving behavior such as steering, braking and accelerating, as well as with the geodata, to the autoaid servers. There, object recognition software identifies the traffic participants, traffic lights, signs and much more. The result for the industry is a detailed, almost inexhaustible volume of data for the driving behavior of millions of car drivers. From the point of view of the end customer the solution also offers attractive retrofittable security systems such as a lane-keeping assistant or a collision warning system.

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