A fast and robust intelligent headlight controller for vehicles

We describe a system that controls whether the headlights of a vehicle are in the highbeam or lowbeam state based on input from a forward looking video camera. The core of the system relies on conventional computer vision techniques, albeit with a sophisticated spot finder front-end. Despite this architecture we are able to use an automated supervised learning technique to tune the system to yield high performance. Using a customer-imposed metric we present both in-car and off-line results from our system along with several competitors, and investigate the system's performance under different weather conditions.