Bosch’s Smart Visor Tracks the Sun While You Drive

The liquid crystal display blocks the sun in just the right spots. An AI-enhanced liquid crystal display (LCD) screen that links with a driver-monitoring camera to keep the sun out of your eyes without blocking the outward view.

The visor links a simple, honeycomb-pattern LCD screen, reinforced with polycarbonate, with a driver-facing RGB camera and an electronic control unit (ECU) running an algorithm and AI program.

The camera detects a driver’s face—eyes, nose, forehead—and the shadows the sun creates on the face. AI tracks those facial landmarks, along with the sun’s relative position in the vehicle environment. Analyzing faces and shadows, the system essentially works backward, figuring out where light is entering the vehicle, no matter in which direction the car is headed.

That AI employs neural networks and histogram of oriented gradients methods, with Bosch-trained models for those two AI techniques. Algorithms for shadow detection and to steer the screen are trained using domain-specific input data, e.g., real-world data from the vehicle.

A patented algorithm pinpoints the driver’s eye position, and selectively darkens or lightens portions of the screen to ensure drivers aren’t blinded. The proprietary algorithm determines the shadows and where to block corresponding sections of the visor surface. 90 percent of the visor field remains transparent at all times, no matter the sun’s intensity or angle, which eliminates that annoying limbo where drivers constantly adjust their visor or try to peer under or around it.

One cool bit is that, with driver-monitoring cameras now gaining traction in luxury cars, including the Cadillac CT6, to safely manage semi-autonomous driving functions, the Virtual Visor might become an affordable add-on: If a camera and computing power is already onboard, all that’s needed is the visor and more lines of code.