BETTER PARKING ASSISTANCE WITH SNAPDRAGON PROCESSORS

Driving is getting easier with the help of technology like GPS navigation, infotainment systems, and eventually full-on driverless cars may even take all the work upon themselves. But for now, parking is still an everyday task that humans need to cope with (thankfully we do at least have parking space finder applications enabled through automotive telematics capability and cloud service).

Still, once you find that coveted space, drivers never have a perfect view of their surroundings, and often have to strain their necks or jump out of the car to see the road, curb or another vehicle. That is, until now. One of the features highlighted in the Qualcomm Cadillac XTS technology concept car, enabled by Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive Solutions, is parking assistance with 360° surround view. We think it’s a real game changer.

Clearly, avoiding collisions while parking is much easier when drivers know what’s around them. Imagine being able to pull up to a parking spot and have a 360° birds-eye view of the surrounding space right on the dashboard in front of you. The image looks like there’s an unmanned aerial vehicle hovering above your car, like some sort of robotic parking angel.

Thanks to the processing power of the Adreno GPU on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 602A processor, this kind of full view of the surrounding area is possible in real-time. Four fish-eye cameras capture ultra wide-angle fields of view around the front, back, left, and right of the car. Each input then delivers an HD image. At first, these images are independent of each other and have a morphed, fish eye effect. The images are fed to the CPU, then the GPU takes over and processes them with camera aggregation software—unwarping each camera frame from the original fish-eye view.

The GPU works to transform the perspective to generate the top-view and clips the images accordingly. In the post-processing stage, it proceeds to correct the color and blend the image to stitch together the full bird’s-eye view. It’s a computationally intensive process, but the GPU is designed to accelerate to support continuous image capturing at 30fps.

The finished product is engineered to be a seamless top-down 360° surround view that drivers can look at in real-time to help them park safely. Whatever the parking needs, like parallel parking or backing into a tight spot, this advanced image processing helps by providing an aerial view of the surrounding area.

Powering the 360° surround view is one way that Snapdragon 602A processors are designed to enhance automotive safety for drivers and their passengers (and all the car doors around them). Stay tuned for more in-depth looks at the various systems and capabilities enabled by Snapdragon Auto Solutions.