Ford Headlight Tech Uses Infrared to Identify Living Things

Car manufacturers have been making adaptive headlights for a number of years. These systems are designed to steer the headlights in the direction your car is being steered in to help see around corners. But Ford is working on new technologies which could dramatically improve safety when driving on dark roads.

Using a combination of cameras and GPS information, Ford’s Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System tech offer major new improvements over other systems. The GPS-based information can help adaptive headlights better anticipate turns and dips in the road and adjust dynamically. In addition, the lights can automatically widen at junctions and traffic circles in order to better illuminate cross-traffic.

But the really intriguing tech is something in the pre-development stages called Spot Lighting. This system adds an infrared camera to look for the heat signature of humans and animals, then aims one of two independent spotlight beam in their direction to illuminate the potential hazard.

In addition, the system displays the positions of up to eight potential hazards in an on-screen display. Ford expects the Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System to be available to consumers in the near future, while the Spot Lighting system is still in the early development stages.