This paper presents the results obtained by the 2WIDE_SENSE Project, an EU funded project aimed at developing a low cost camera sensor able to acquire the full spectrum from the visible bandwidth to the Short Wave InfraRed one (from 400 to 1700？nm). Two specific applications have been evaluated, both related to the automotive field: one regarding the possibility of detecting icy and wet surfaces in front of the vehicle and the other regarding the pedestrian detection capability. The former application relies on the physical fact that water shows strong electromagnetic radiation absorption capabilities in the SWIR band around 1450？nm and thus an icy or wet pavement should be seen as dark; the latter is based on the observation that the amount of radiation in the SWIR band is quite high even at night and in case of poor weather conditions. Results show that even the use of SWIR and visible spectrum seems to be a promising approach; the use in outdoor environment is not always effective. 1. Introduction Increasing the road safety is an objective of mainstream importance for every political institution and great improvement capabilities are possible with development of more intelligent vehicles. The ability to properly analyze the context in which the vehicle is moving, under hard real time constraints, is strongly influenced by the availability of powerful sensors. Conversely this kind of sensors is usually quite expensive and so it makes the development of affordable intelligent vehicle a difficult task. Many research efforts are then spent with the aim to build cheap smart sensors that could provide data to better analyze such a complex environment as the automotive one. The SWIR sensor presented is such a kind of smart, low cost device. To validate its usefulness this paper presents the results obtained in two different functionalities: detecting pedestrians and in discriminating amongst wet, dry, or icy pavement. These functionalities were selected since the additional use of the SWIR bandwidth component should, theoretically, improve the results. 1.1. SWIR Band Usually as SWIR it is identified the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that ranges approximately from 1？μm to 2？μm. Similarly to what happens with visible light, in standard automotive applications this band is mainly populated by the light reflected by different objects in the scene rather than by their thermal blackbody radiation, so that the only applications served by SWIR are those which benefit from reduced scattering effects of longer wavelengths like illumination from invisible
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