2014 International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo (ICCVE)

Coordinated, Progressive Vehicular Headlight Glare

Reduction for Driver Safety using Wireless Sensor
Networks
Alin Devassy? , Nithya Gopinath† , Vishnu Narayanan§ , Anand Ramachandran†
Analog Devices, Inc.? , Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications, Amrita University† ,
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita University§ ,
{aalinandu, nithyagopinath91, vishnunarayananb}@gmail.com, anandramachandran@am.amrita.edu

Abstract—Driving at night is one of the leading causes of

traffic related deaths. The lack of adequate light at night impairs
a driver, preventing him/her from being able to judge distances
between objects accurately as well as preventing a driver from
recognizing various objects on the street and avoiding them.
Additionally, high intensity light from the headlights of oncoming
vehicles causes temporary blindness, leading to accidents. In our
proposed research, we measure the intensity of light incident
on a vehicle (say V1) from an oncoming vehicle (say V2). If
the light intensity is above a certain threshold – calibrated a-
priori – then vehicle V1 automatically requests the oncoming
vehicle V2 to reduce its light intensity. The reduction in light
intensity is automatically done by the oncoming vehicle V2 by
lowering its light beam fractionally so as to satisfy the first
vehicle’s (V1’s) request, while still maintaining adequate light
for the driver of oncoming vehicle (V2). This process may need
to be repeated several times before two vehicles cross each other.
Thus an optimal headlight attenuation is achieved which satisfies
both parties, thereby improving visibility and traffic safety.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Every year across the world, nearly 36,000 people are
killed and around 3.5 million people are injured in vehicular
accidents [1]. More than 50% of these accidents occur at night
even though the traffic at night is significantly lesser. This
is mainly because of poor road lighting which is common
in developing countries. Additionally, vehicles tend to move
faster at night as the number of vehicles on the road is usually
fewer compared to the daytime, which can further increase
the probability of an accident. Numerous research studies have
shown that using headlights on high beam is one of the primary
causes for nighttime accidents.
In India, most of the highways are narrow single lane
roads, not separated by medians. Due to this, high beam
headlights strike the driver’s eyes directly making it virtually
impossible to see the road ahead. This can cause temporary
blindness, leading to fatal head-on collisions with oncoming
traffic. Today, drivers manually switch from high to low beam
to reduce headlight intensity when they see oncoming traffic.
However, due to fatigue caused by repeated switching this
conscientious switching is neglected by drivers. As a result,
the headlights are left on high beam continuously, resulting in
the problems alluded to above (see Figure 1).
All previous methods to solve this problem focused on
detecting the presence of an oncoming vehicle using various
sensors, cameras and complex vision and image processing
techniques [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Their goal was to confirm the
Fig. 1. The poster issued in India, pictorially depicts the problem of
temporary blindness caused by headlights on high beam and urges drivers
to use headlights on low beam instead.
presence of an oncoming vehicle and subsequently attenuate
their own headlight by switching from high to low beam.
In an earlier work, we proposed a novel method to solve
this problem [7]. Our solution used a simple, low-cost, easily
deployable hardware module that would be affixed to every
vehicle. The module used sensors to detect the presence of an
oncoming vehicle and used wireless communication to request
the oncoming vehicle to lower its headlight from high to low
beam. With the option of a manual override, the oncoming
vehicle would automatically switch its headlight to low beam.
The singular contribution of this work was the use of wireless
communication between the two vehicles which allowed for:
1) A confirmation that the light ahead was that of an
oncoming vehicle (and not a stray light source), and,
2) Coordination between the two vehicles, allowing for
both vehicles to automatically accept or manually
reject the request, thereby improving vehicular safety.
However, we observed that there was a significant reduction
in visibility for the driver of a vehicle that lowered its headlight
from high to low beam. We therefore propose to gradually
lower the headlight so as to satisfy the request of the oncoming
vehicle while simultaneously maximizing the road visibility for
the driver.

978-1-4799-6729-2/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 14 DOI 10.1109/ICCVE.2014.238

Fig. 2. The figure shows three scenarios possible with headlights. In Case 1,
the car on the left has its headlights on high beam. As a result, this light
strikes the driver of the car on the right directly in the eye, causing temporary
blindness. In Case 2, the car on the left has its headlights on low beam. While
the light does not strike the driver of the car on the right directly, it does not
provide luminance of the road ahead to the car on the left, impacting the
left car driver’s visibility significantly. In Case 3, the car on the left has its
headlights at an optimal intermediate angle. The light does not impact the
driver of the oncoming car on the right and simultaneously provides optimal
visibility to the driver of the car on the left.
II. P ROPOSED S OLUTION AND S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE
The proposed enhancement of using a variable-angled
headlight stemmed from our experimental observations made
in rural and inter-state highways. We noticed that for most cars,
the low beam was not very effective when traveling at high
speeds and in the presence of oncoming vehicles. Thus, while
we had solved the problem of eliminating blinding high beam
lights, we had a sub-optimal solution where we were traveling
for long distances with our headlights on low beam. Thus, as
shown in Figure 2, we needed a solution where our lights lit
the roadway far ahead while simultaneously not impacting the
visibility of the driver of the oncoming vehicle (Case 3).
Needless to say, the angle of the variable light beam needed
to be modified dynamically as the two vehicles approached
each other. We considered two approaches to solve the prob-
lem. Our first approach was to query the distance of the on-
coming car at regular, discrete intervals and adjust the angle of
the light beam accordingly. Our second and optimal approach
used the information of the oncoming vehicle’s speed as well
as distance to dynamically calculate the angle necessary for
the headlight and continuously varied it to provide maximum
visibility.
The proposed solution required that we retrofit all vehicles
with an embedded wireless sensor node. The system architec-
ture of this proposed WSN node is showing in Figure 3. The
lights of an approaching vehicle are detected by the light sensor
in the embedded system which is sampled periodically by
the micro-controller. Once the readings exceed a pre-defined,
calibrated threshold, the system initiates communication with
the oncoming vehicle, requesting it to lower its headlight. The
moment an acknowledgment is received, the system uses the
distance and speed sensor to calculate the appropriate headlight
angle. The micro-controller then drives the attached DC motor
to change the angle of its headlights to the appropriate value.
Through frequent sampling and headlight angle correction
the system eliminates glare to the oncoming vehicle while
simultaneously maximizing the visibility of the road ahead.
15
Fig. 3. The figure shows the adopted System Architecture for the pro-
posed solution. The system consists of a light sensor – to measure the
headlight intensity of an oncoming vehicle, and distance and speed sen-
sors to likewise measure the distance and speed of an oncoming vehicle.
Communication with the oncoming traffic is done through an XBee Pro
module (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBee). Depending on sensor inputs and
the chosen algorithm, the micro-controller drives the motor to control the
angle of the headlight. The entire process can be aborted or pre-empted using
a manual override.
III. C ONCLUSION
The use of headlights on high beam at night causes
temporary blindness in drivers, leading to fatal accidents. In
an earlier work, we proposed a novel coordinated, consensual
method for automatically switching headlights of vehicles from
high to low beam using Wireless Sensor Networks. In this
work, we present a critical improvement to our earlier solution,
wherein we gradually lower the headlights of both vehicles in
order to maximize visibility for the driver while eliminating
the problem caused by headlights on high beam. The solution
is currently being implemented and tested. We realize that
our solution that considers only one car in each direction
is currently simplistic, and expect to face challenges when
implemented for a larger number of cars in each direction. We
hope to use a clustering approach to address the issue. The
optimality and practicality of the approach and improvement
over our previous work remains to be seen.
R EFERENCES
[1] “Motor Vehicle Safety.” [Online]. http://www.nsc.org/safetyhome/Motor
VehicleSafety/Pages/MotorVehicleSafety.aspx
[2] “Toyota headlight regulation using cameras.” [Online].
http://www.autonews.com/article/20130513/OEM11/305139967/
[3] “MultiBeam LED: New 2015 Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class.” [Online].
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpA1Hw2GBY4
[4] Y.-L. Chen, Nighttime Vehicle Light Detection on a Moving Vehicle using
Image Segmentation and Analysis Techniques, In ACM Jour. of WSEAS
Transactions on Computers, 8(3), 2009
[5] J. H. Connell, B. W. Herta, S. Pankanti, H. Hess and S. Pliefke, A Fast
and Robust Intelligent Headlight Controller for Vehicles, In Proc. of the
IEEE Intelligent Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2011
[6] V. Nutt, S. Kher and M. Raval, Fuzzy Headlight Intensity Controller using
Wireless Sensor Network, In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference
on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ), 2013
[7] K. A. U. Menon, A. D. Ananyase and P. Pradeep, Consensual and
Coordinated Vehicular Headlight Attenuation using Wireless Sensor
Networks, In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computing,
Communications and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), 2014