A promotional video for Mobileye, the Israeli self-driving car company. Image by YouTube

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An Israeli start-up believes it can solve some of the tricky problems faced by self-driving cars by employing thermal cameras to detect heat from pedestrians, animals and objects, the latest technology being tested in the fast-growing industry.

Start-up AdaSky announced on Monday that it had developed a far infrared (FIR) thermal camera that works with computer vision algorithms to detect people or objects on the road. The camera is designed to help in so-called “edge cases” in autonomous driving, where other sensors might fail.

Automakers and their suppliers working on self-driving cars have been experimenting in recent years with forward-facing cameras, radar, and Lidar, which uses light pulses to “see” the road. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and all elements must communicate with each other.

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“The (automakers) are now beginning to understand it’s not enough,” Eyal Madar, AdaSky’s chief technology officer, told Reuters. “They need a new sensor … to help them with edge cases.”

A full self-driving prototype of AdaSky’s system would be ready within a year, with mass production two to three years away, he said.

The company says a thermal camera can outperform a traditional camera at challenging times such as at night, in fog or rain, or at sunset or sunrise.

Another difficulty for self-driving cars are their inability to differentiate between images and the real thing. For example, the image of a bear in an advertisement plastered across the back of a truck may be viewed by the car following the truck as a real bear, causing the car to brake.

In detecting the differences in temperatures emitted by living objects and inanimate objects, however, the thermal camera would help avoid this scenario.

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