ANTI-GLARE HEADLIGHT SYSTEM
Chitra Balasubramanian
Lyle Ethan Mark Rodericks
Computer Science PESIT
Bangalore , India
chitra2793@gmail.com
Electronics and Communications
REVA ITM
Bangalore , India
lyle963@gmail.com
Abstract
The anti-glare headlight enables vehicle drivers to
take full advantage of their high beams without the fear of
blinding oncoming drivers with the glare that occurs while
driving. Even after 100 years of headlight development,
almost half of vehicle crashes and deaths occur at night
despite the fact that there is much less traffic then .Recent
developments in adaptive lighting have addressed some
dangers and limitations of standard headlights. However, they
have limited flexibility. Their solutions to glare are - switching
between high and low beams, turning off beams toward the
opposing lane or rotating the beam as the vehicle turns. These
are not designed for all driving environments and these sudden
changes can pose as distraction for both drivers.
In this system, we use an LED projector instead of a
standard headlight. This enables us to divide the emitted light
into thousands of tiny powerful beams, each of which can be
independently controlled and programmed .A camera onboard the car detects oncoming vehicles, street lights and other
objects, such as road signs. The programmable headlight beam
is then adjusted accordingly by a processor. Some areas are
dimmed to spare the eyes of oncoming drivers while other
areas might be brightened to highlight street signs, pedestrians
or traffic lanes. The overall illumination is similar to regular
headlights without the danger of blinding traffic in the
opposite lane.
Keywords - Adaptive Headlights ;Image Processing ; Object
Analysis;
I. INTRODUCTION
Glare from headlights, especially high beams of oncoming
vehicles cause significant stress and distraction at best and
temporary blindness at worst. Trucks and other vehicles with
headlights at high positions are the worst offenders. Although
glare is not often reported as a cause of accidents, hundreds of
fatal night crashes attribute glare as a contributing factor every
year . Glare is especially problematic for the elderly whom
take eight times longer to recover from
glare as compared to a 16-year old [4]. Although high beams
are a nuisance to other drivers, they are beneficial on narrow,
curvy, and poorly lit roads, especially in rural areas where
wildlife routinely approaches the road.
Headlights play a crucial role in safe driving. The
National Safety Council reports that three times as many road
fatalities happen at night-time because of the difficult driving
conditions[1]. Headlights should emit a steady beam of light
and be cleaned regularly for optimal performance. From the
1970s to 2011, headlights have been made from moulded
polycarbonate plastic[3]. A quartz-halogen bulb provides the
light from behind the plastic reflector. Popular Mechanics
suggests polycarbonate plastic is lighter and safer than glass.
AutoMedia, however, states that although durable, this plastic
is cheap, scratches and becomes faded easily[2].To overcome
this difficulty of headlights we have adapted a superior
technology of using ADAPTIVE HEADLIGHTS (Projector
lights).
II. REASON FOR USE OF A PROJECTOR
A. Accurate Light Dispersal - The elliptical reflectors
in the projector headlight housing design is a
powerful way to get a focused beam and cut down on
"scatter loss" on the road.
B. Style Accommodation - Those who are advocates of
the projector headlight point out that using this kind
of headlight can enhance the look of the vehicle's
front end and give it a more aesthetic appeal.
C. Lens Based Car Lighting - As the traditional
parabolic reflector style of headlight began to give
ground to newer lighting technologies, projector
headlight design became part of the set of headlamp
options that make use of lens positioning to provide
great setups for night driving.
D. Division of Light Beam - The projector headlights
are divided into smaller units of light, which is at
utmost requirement for our system.
III. STAGES OF PROCESSING
Fig 1. This figure shows a simple representation of a system
flow block diagram which has three stages. a) capture the
image and perform some pre-processing b) process the image
using the below processing block diagram. c) project the final
output on the windshield of the opponent incoming vehicle.
1. Object Analysis
Here we indentify a pair of headlights belonging to the
same vehicle by image processing. Headlights are detected
using the assumption that they are the brightest objects in the
system’s field of view. A very short exposure (150-200 µs)
time is used and the image is thresholded. We identify the
high intensity regions of a given image and find the
coordinates of their centres.[10] If the objects have similar Ycoordinates, horizontal angle of less than 15° and equal
intensity, it is considered as a headlight pair from the same
vehicle.
Algorithm:
Step 1
Get input from the camera
Step 2
Increase the contrast of the image captured
to infinity so bright areas become brighter
and dark areas become darker.
Step 3
The image is thresholded so areas of very
high intensity become white and areas of
lower intensity become black.
Step 4
Extract the white areas and form objects.
Step 5
Retrieve 2 objects (A and B).
Step 6
Compare object A and B and check if they
are headlight pairs. If yes, go to step 8, else
step 7.
Step 7
Collect next object B if possible. If not,
collect next object A if possible. If all
objects are exhausted and compared with
one another, go to step 1.
Step 8
If the two objects belong to the same pair of
headlights then calculate the mask position
and size by the following calculations and
project the mask.
IV. CALCULATIONS
2. Shadow Placement
The various stages involved in casting a shadow are
 After the headlight pairs are identified, each of their
centroids are parsed to this stage.
 The distance between these centroids is measured.


Half the distance is calculated and taken as the side
length of a square which is plotted above the left
headlight.
In the Indian driving system the driver is seated at the
right side of the vehicle. So we now cast a shadow to
the leftmost half of the incoming vehicle’s windscreen.
Casting a shadow is done by programming the
projectors.
Led Lamp efficiency = 60lm/W
Lamp power = 2100 lm = 2100/60 = 35W
Projector’s processor, fan etc. = ~60W
Raspberry Pi power = ~1.5W
∴ Total Power consumption = 96.5 to 100 Watt.
Calorific value of Petrol = 47kJ/g
Density of Petrol = 0.71kg/L
∴ Energy per Litre of Petrol = 47K
0.71 = 47
710 = 34MJ
E=P÷t⇒t=E÷P
t = 34MJ ÷ 100W = 255 Hours
∴ One Litre of petrol will power the system for 94 hours
Mask plotted is a square whose length is half the distance
between the centroids of the headlights.
l = d/2.
V. HARDWARE USED
The main hardware we used in this experiment is:

The processor used is a Raspberry Pi which
provides a low latency, energy efficient (1.21
Watts) solution to automate the headlights. It is
Fig 2. The above flowchart shows the various
processes in the anti-glare headlight system.
ideal due to its dedicated GPU, HDMI output and
low cost of Rs.3000.

The projector used is a Zync 2100 which costs
only Rs.4500 in spite of its 2100 lumen
brightness.

A 160x120 pixel camera with a CMOS sensor
highly sensitive to light with correlated double
sampling to significantly reduce noise was used to
capture images. The camera is sensitive to visible
and near infrared light since most objects of
interest are detectable within this spectrum of
light. The Camera cost is about Rs.300.
the sizeable number of drivers (about 30%) who experienced
night time glare as ‘disturbing’ cannot be ignored. The
response data of drivers falling into this category was further
analysed to bring out the differences that might exist due to
the type of glare and age and gender of the respondent. In fact,
the frequency distributions of the glare-disturbed respondents
over age and gender groups, for oncoming and following
glare, did not indicate any difference due to the type of glare;
the distributions were found in close proximity with each
other. Fig3 below show the average number of deaths ,
represented in % with and without glare.
VI. EXPERIMENTS
We have simulated the experiment on MATLAB and have
arrived at good results. We’ve tested the simulation it in two
ways.

Using a live input from the headlights of another
car.

Preloading a video into the code. The tested
results have been shown in fig2 below.
[11]
VIII. SURVEY OF LITERATURE
Fig 3. This figure is divided into four main regions.
a) A raw footage taken. b) detecting the light sources and
finding their respective x-axis and y-axis. c) real-time shadow
placement-is done by programming the adaptive headlights to
cast a shadow on the windshield of the opponent car. d) the
view of output from the headlight.
VII. STATISTICAL DATA
On an average 1.3 million people die every year due to road
crashes. That makes an average of 3287 deaths a day.
Approximately 30% of drivers are stressed by glare causing
hundreds of fatalities every year [6]. Thus, a headlight that
adapts to the environment can be critical to improving safety
on the road during poor visibility conditions.
According to the National Center for Statistics and
Analysis[1],[6],the following results have been obtained.
They have surveyed on age, and gender. There was not much
difference on the gender, but a significant difference on the
age. The results show that for the majority of respondents
(about 54%) glare was ‘noticeable but acceptable’. However,
While searching for alternative technology that solves this
glare issue, we found 3 main approaches.
1.Polarizing of headlights[7]:
It has been suggested that polarized light be employed in the
elimination of automobile glare, where the headlights of motor
vehicles be equipped with means for polarizing in a
predetermined manner the beams emanating therefrom, and
that the Windshields of said vehicles be equipped with
cooperative polarizers adapted to block the light emanating
from the headlights of an approaching car.
2. Antiglare optical device[8]:
The present invention relates to a method of deposition of an
absorbing material upon a glass substrate as an antiglare
optical device for protecting the eyes by reducing the glare by
absorbing the light intensity falling upon it in a non-uniform
fashion.
3. Movable Headlamps[9]:
The high beam of the AFS works like a conventional high
beam, but does not require the driver to take action to avoid
exposing oncoming drivers to excessive glare. When an on
board camera detects the oncoming vehicle, it lowers the focus
of the headlamp towards the ground.
Our approach is superior to these because it is universal and
does not require and special design to cater to different
vehicles. It is inexpensive in comparison to the above and has
a much lower latency since it has no moving parts.
IX. FUTURE WORK
The automotive headlight should not be a passive device that
can only be completely switched on or off. It should be
capable of adapting to the environment to improve safety in
poor visibility conditions. Moreover, the design for adaptive
headlights should not be limited to a single task. It should be
capable of performing many different tasks to help the driver
in multiple road environments. Our headlight design provides
unprecedented light beam control over space and time. We
have demonstrated the flexibility of the headlight for
numerous tasks: allowing drivers to use high beams without
glaring any other driver on the road and allowing better
illumination of road lanes, sidewalks and dividers. Our
prototype can quickly react to the road environment within 2
to milliseconds, and, thus does not create any flicker to be
seen by the human eye. Further research and development is
needed to make the prototype compact to fit within actual
vehicle headlight compartments. Further engineering is
required to make the system reliable in the presence of
vehicular vibrations and heat. Lastly, more sophisticated
algorithms and reliable software need to be developed before
deploying our headlight design.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Nighttime Glare and
Driving Performance. (2007)
Wang, O., Fuchs, M., Fuchs, C., Davis, J., Seidel, H.-P., Lensch, H. P.
A.: A Context-Aware Light Source. In: IEEE International Conference
on Computational Photography (ICCP), Cambridge, MA (2010)
Rice, L.: Headlight with Single LED Module. SAE Technical Paper
2010-01-0295 (2010)
AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety: How To Avoid Headlight Glare.
(2013)
Bullough, J. and Rea, M., "Visibility from Vehicle Headlamps and
Roadway Lighting in Urban, Suburban and Rural Locations," SAE
Technical Paper 2010-01-0298, 2010, doi:10.4271/2010-01-0298.
[6] National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Report on Drivers’
Perceptions of Headlight Glare from Oncoming and Following Vehicles.
[7] https://www.google.com/patents/US2237565 Dec 15 , 1937
[8] https://www.google.com/patents/US6674587 Mar 30, 2001
[9] HELLA KGaA Hueck & Co. http://www.hella.com/hella-com/620.html
[10] http://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/28757-trackingred-color-objects-using-matlab
[11] Statistical Assesment of the Glare Issue National Center for Statistics
and Analysis &National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.