US 5,541,590 · Granted 1996-07-30
The 1996 Patent That Taught Cars to See Danger Coming
Imagine a camera on your car that watches the road ahead and uses artificial intelligence to spot when a crash is about to happen—then automatically triggers your airbags or safety systems before impact. That's what this 1996 patent describes: a predictive crash-detection system trained on real driving data to recognize dangerous situations in milliseconds.
The plain-English version
What it protects
The claim covers a system that combines a camera mounted on a vehicle, a neural network trained to recognize crash scenarios from image data, and an automated connection to safety devices like airbags or braking systems. What's protected here is the specific method of using a pre-trained artificial intelligence to analyze real-time road images and trigger protective mechanisms when collision risk is detected—not just reacting to impact, but predicting it before it happens.
Why it matters
This patent represents an early push to move car safety from passive (absorbing crashes after they happen) to active (preventing or softening them before impact). Neural networks and computer vision were experimental territory in 1996, so filing this at Takata—a major airbag and restraint supplier—signaled the industry's shift toward AI-assisted vehicle intelligence. The patent staked out intellectual property in predictive safety at a time when most competitors were still focused on traditional impact sensors.
Real-world use
Modern collision-avoidance systems in luxury vehicles—like forward-collision warning or automatic emergency braking—operate on principles very similar to this patent: cameras and sensors watch the road, software evaluates threat level, and safety systems activate preemptively.
Original USPTO abstract
A system for predicting and evading crash of a vehicle includes an image pick-up device mounted on the vehicle for picking up images of actual ever-changing views when the vehicle is on running to produce actual image data, a crash predicting device associated with said image pick-up device, said crash predicting device being successively supplied with the actual image data for predicting occurrence of crash between the vehicle and potentially dangerous objects on the roadway to produce an operational signal when there is possibility of crash and a safety drive ensuring device connected to said crash predicting device for actuating, in response to the operational signal, an occupant protecting mechanism which is operatively connected thereto and equipped in the vehicle. The crash predicting device includes a neural network which is previously trained with training data to predict the possibility of crash, the training data representing ever-changing views previously picked-up from said image picking-up device during driving of the vehicle for causing actual crash.
Patent details
- Publication number
- US 5,541,590
- Filing date
- 1995-01-19
- Grant date
- 1996-07-30
- Assignee
- Takata Corporation
- Inventor(s)
- NISHIO; TOMOYUKI
- CPC class
- B60R16/0231
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