Vehicle safety is one of the major areas in which automakers are making considerable investments. Automobile manufacturers have created a number of technologies that can aid in the prevention of traffic accidents over the years. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are technologies that automate, facilitate, and improve vehicular systems to assist drivers in safe and better driving (ADAS). Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are technological safety measures that help drivers prevent on-road incidents by alerting them to potential risks. This allows the driver to quickly regain control of their vehicle, boosting their capacity to react to road hazards.

Vision-based driver assistance systems is one of the rapidly growing research areas of ITS, due to various factors such as the increased level of safety requirements in automotive, computational power in embedded systems, and desire to get closer to autonomous driving. It is a cross disciplinary area encompassing specialised fields like computer vision, machine learning, robotic navigation, embedded systems, automotive electronics and safety critical software. In this paper, we survey the list of vision based advanced driver assistance systems with a consistent terminology and propose a taxonomy. We also propose an abstract model in an attempt to formalize a top-down view of application development to scale towards autonomous driving system.

Embedded vision solutions will be a key enabler for making automobiles fully autonomous. Giving an automobile a set of eyes – in the form of multiple cameras and image sensors – is a first step, but it also will be critical for the automobile to interpret content from those images and react accordingly. To accomplish this, embedded vision processors must be hardware optimized for performance while achieving low power and small area, have tools to program the hardware efficiently, and have algorithms to run on these processors. The significant automotive safety improvements in the past (e.g., shatter-resistant glass, three-point seatbelts, airbags), were passive safety measures designed to minimize damage during an accident. We now have technology that can actively help the driver avoid crashing in the first place.