Today, Basemark officially announced the world’s first cross-platform eye-tracking application for automotive OEMs. It is the latest breakthrough in its Rocksolid Core end-to-end automotive OS. High-quality eye-tracking is the central technology on which modern driver monitoring systems (DMS) are built. DMS can help reduce the number of fatalities and injuries related to car traffic, most of which are due to human error. The first version of this capability continues to be advanced by the Basemark team in cooperation with its ecosystem of partners.
This breakthrough comes as driver monitoring systems are now set to be mandated by the European Union in all new cars by 2026. With the new regulation in place, it is believed at least 140,000 serious injuries will have been avoided by 2038.
“Driver monitoring systems are becoming a new safety standard for all vehicles, and every OEM will have to implement one. With our unique, cross-platform implementation, we enable OEMs to more rapidly and more cost-efficiently develop this system in their cars,” says Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Basemark. “This advancement will help make roads a safer place for everyone while pushing Basemark to the forefront of automotive industry innovation.”
Rocksolid Core’s eye-tracking-based driver monitoring system notices driver drowsiness or distraction by following the driver’s gaze. It detects drowsiness, impairment or distraction by the driver’s eye and head movements and reacts accordingly. Combined with other advances within Rocksolid Core, such as object detection, safe instrument cluster, and lane-keeping assistance, using eye-tracking instead of handgrip on the wheel as an indicator could provide an even safer way for engineers to rethink the driver’s actions that may lead to accidents.
For automotive OEMs, implementing driver monitoring systems has traditionally been a costly and time-consuming process. Basemark alleviates this pain by providing a licensable reference design application that is readily portable to practically any hardware and software environment. This enables OEMs to re-use the same application across their premium, medium, and volume models, each of which may have different processors and software stacks.
“We enable OEMs to implement a drive monitoring system with eye-tracking capability in a cost-efficient way,” continues Sarkkinen. “The most special aspect of our eye-tracking capability is that it runs on our inference engine that’s accelerated by a GPU through Vulkan, making it easily portable to various GPUs. This makes it easy for any automotive OEMs to build world-class eye-tracking capabilities across their product portfolio.”
The Basemark team will be attending the Automotive Tech Week 2021 event in Michigan starting November 15th. Visit them at their booth number 739 of the main hall.
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