Image Processing Sensor

A camera with a computer in it. The distinction from a plain camera is the whole point: a reversing camera sends a picture to a screen for a person to interpret, while an image processing sensor interprets the picture itself and reports conclusions — a lane marking, a vehicle, a speed limit sign, a pedestrian — to the systems that act on them.

So losing one does not produce a blank screen; it produces driver assistance quietly ceasing to work — lane departure warning and lane keeping, traffic sign recognition, automatic high beam, and on many vehicles part of the automatic emergency braking decision. A system that has silently stopped is worse than one never fitted, because the habit it replaced has already been given up.

Windscreen replacement is the most important question to ask, and for two reasons. The obvious one is that a forward camera behind the screen is disturbed. The expensive one is calibration — a camera looking through glass must be re-aligned to the vehicle with a target board at a measured distance on level ground, and a screen replaced without it leaves a camera that works perfectly and looks slightly wrong.

On multi-camera surround-view installations, losing one camera usually disables the whole feature, because a stitched overhead image with a quarter missing would mislead about what has been checked.