Basemark and DMP Partner to Develop Smart Mirrors for commercial vehicles

Smart mirror technologies will help reduce accidents and fatalities resulting from blind spots

Helsinki, Finland and Tokyo, Japan -- July 1, 2020 – Basemark Oy ("Basemark") of Finland and Digital Media Professionals Inc. ("DMP") of Japan, announced today a partnership to develop a smart mirror system for the global commercial vehicle industry.

In 2017, there were 511,455 crashes in the US involving a large truck or a bus. Of those, 4,455 were crashes with fatalities¹. In the EU, trucks account for about 2%² of vehicles on the road but represent 15%³ of fatalities. Many of these crashes can be attributed to limited visibility from the cockpit, including multiple blind spots. Smart mirrors can reduce the rate of accidents and fatalities due to these blind spots.

A smart mirror system consists of cameras, displays and a system that handles machine vision, object recognition and classification, as well as dynamic augmented reality rendering in real-time. In the partnership announced today, Basemark will integrate its Rocksolid® compute and rendering engine with DMP’s DV720 Inference IP Core and DMP ZIA™ classifier. These technologies together enable fast and power-efficient real-time operation of the smart mirror to detect and classify objects such as pedestrians, cars, and bikes, and render augmented reality helper, alert and warning graphics.

Another benefit of replacing traditional mirrors with smart mirrors is that the mirror display no longer needs to be placed outside of the cockpit. In a smart mirror solution, the mirror is an LCD display that can be placed inside the vehicle, thus enabling a more aerodynamic solution that leads to reduced drag and thereby lower fuel or energy consumption.

"We are excited to join forces with DMP in developing a truly advanced and automotive-grade smart mirror system," says Keith Silverang, the CEO of Basemark. "This solution will be able to reduce thousands of deaths annually resulting from blind spots."

"Smart mirrors in commercial vehicles require high performance, reliability, and a high degree of safety. DMP and Basemark build the industry's most advanced and safe smart mirrors based on their extensive experiences in the automotive industry," says Tatsuo Yamamoto, the Chairman and CEO of DMP.

¹ https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-truck-and-bus-crash-facts-2017#A1
² https://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/vehicles-in-use
https://www.acea.be/publications/article/factsheet-trucks
³ https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/files/pdf/statistics/dacota/bfs2017_hgvs.pdf

About Basemark

Basemark Oy is a privately held company registered and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.
Basemark provides software and engineering services for the global automotive industry and also boasts several Fortune 500 customers in the consumer electronics and various other industry sectors. For more information, please visit https://www.basemark.com.

About DMP

Digital Media Professionals is an R&D-type fabless semiconductor vendor that deploys licensing business of hardware IPs and software IPs based on proprietary 2D/3D graphics technology for embedded devices, as well as graphics LSI business that incorporates these IPs. In recent years, in order to become the world's leading "AI Computing Company", DMP provides solutions through a broad portfolio including AI processor IPs, hardware/software products and services, and AI ecosystem established by its own. For more information, please visit https://www.dmprof.com/en/.