Suzuki Working on Rearview Camera

[Hugh Janus]

Suzuki is working on a rear-facing camera system to complement the mirrors on a motorcycle to improve vision in the rider’s blind spot. (Suzuki/)

The idea of replacing mirrors with a rear-facing camera has been a staple of concept bikes for at least the last couple of decades, but the technology remains rare even today when such hardware is cheaper and more widely available than ever. Suzuki might be about to change that after teaming up with electronics specialist Tokai Rika to develop a motorcycle-specific rear-camera system.

This time it’s not intended, at least initially, as a direct replacement for conventional mirrors but as a supplementary safety system to give at-a-glance clarity about what’s in your blind spot. The focus is on making the relevant part of the image immediately clear even though it’s displayed on a relatively small screen, whether that’s directly behind you or over your shoulder.

With TFT displays and cameras getting cheaper and cheaper, it's only a matter of time before bikes start adopting rearview cameras on a larger scale. (Suzuki/)

While there might be aerodynamic and styling advantages to be had from ditching mirrors altogether—something that’s increasingly happening with electric cars in the quest for ever-lower drag—there are still legislative hurdles to clear in much of the world, and even the best cameras have shortcomings compared to a simple mirror and the human eye. Not least because you can extend or change your field of view with a mirror by moving your head, while a camera shows a fixed display of the area it’s focused on.

That’s something the Suzuki system aims to address. To get a broad view of what’s happening behind the bike, it uses a single, wide-angle camera mounted on the tail, but as a result there’s just too much information to be of use on the standard TFT instrument display ahead of the rider. We’re all told “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” and with a wide-angle camera that problem gets amplified, as other vehicles look very small even when they’re quite near, making the view hard for our minds to decode and making it difficult to pick out cars that might be quite close but still only occupy a small section of the screen.

How to solve that problem? The answer, according to the Suzuki patent, is for the image on the screen to crop in on only the relevant section of the image that the camera generates, and that section will change depending on what you’re doing. The patent suggests that the cropping could be done manually, using bar-mounted buttons to switch between zoomed-in and wide-angle views, or automatically. In the latter situation, the screen might show a zoomed-in view of the road directly behind you when you’re traveling in a straight line, so you can get a clear indication of how close a following vehicle is, but when you hit the turn signal, it would switch to showing the blind spot over the appropriate shoulder to make lane changes easier.

The patent explains how the image could be zoomed either manually or automatically. (Suzuki/)

The patent suggests the view on the screen could be zoomed in in steps or smoothly—the latter potentially giving the rider a clearer understanding of exactly which part of the road behind he’s seeing—and that it could return to a straight-ahead or wide-angle view automatically after a preset time. It would also allow the rider to set the level of zoom and the area of each blind spot to suit personal preferences. So the display makes sense, the image from the camera is inverted to give a view that complements what you’re seeing in the mirrors.

The view could be tailored to what the bike is currently doing and where it is on the road. (Suzuki/)

Since digital cameras and color TFT displays are so cheap and widely available, their use as a supplementary rearview system alongside legally required mirrors makes a lot of sense. Some cars already adopt a system like the idea proposed in Suzuki’s patent. Some Kia models, for example, will automatically pop up a live image of the relevant blind spot on their main dash display when you activate a turn signal to change lanes. It’s logical for the same idea to make its way to motorcycles.

Bikes with rearview cameras do exist. The Norton V4SV, for example, has a rear-facing camera that displays its image on the TFT dash, with the rev counter and speed superimposed in front of it. Both front and rear cameras are also increasingly popular in the Chinese market, where several bikes come with them fitted as standard, though these are usually intended to operate more like dashcams, recording events in case they need to be analyzed later, rather than live views.

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