There is a growing social interest in developing vision-based vehicle guidance systems for improving traffic safety and efficiency and the environment. Ex amples of vision-based vehicle guidance systems include collision warning systems, steering control systems for tracking painted lane marks, and speed control systems for preventing rear-end collisions. Like other guidance systems for aircraft and trains, these systems are ex pected to increase traffic safety significantly. For example, safety improve ments of aircraft landing processes after the introduction of automatic guidance systems have been reported to be 100 times better than prior to installment. Although the safety of human lives is beyond price, the cost for automatic guidance could be compensated by decreased insurance costs. It is becoming more important to increase traffic safety by decreasing the human driver's load in our society, especially with an increasing population of senior people who continue to drive. The second potential social benefit is the improvement of traffic efficiency by decreasing the spacing between vehicles without sacrificing safety. It is reported, for example, that four times the efficiency is expected if the spacing between cars is controlled automatically at 90 cm with a speed of 100 kmjh compared to today's typical manual driving. Although there are a lot of tech nical, psychological, and social issues to be solved before realizing the high density jhigh-speed traffic systems described here, highly efficient highways are becoming more important because of increasing traffic congestion.
