During the period from dusk to dark, when it is difficult for drivers to see other vehicles, or when visibility is poor due to rain, snow, etc., the contrast between nearby vehicles and the background is lower. Under such conditions, conventional surveillance systems have difficulty detecting the outline of nearby vehicles and may thus fail to recognize them. To solve this problem, we have developed a rear and side surveillance system for vehicles that uses image processing. The system uses two stereo cameras to monitor the areas to the rear and sides of a vehicle, i.e., a driver's blind spots, and to detect the positions and relative speeds of other vehicles. The proposed system can estimate the shape of a vehicle from a partial outline of it, thus identifying the vehicle by filling in the missing parts of the vehicle outline. Testing of the system under various environmental conditions showed that the rate of errors (false and missed detection) in detecting approaching vehicles was reduced to less than 10%, even under conditions that are problematic for conventional processing.

In the domains involving environmental changes, some knowledge and heuristics which were useful for solving problems in the previous environment often become unsuitable for problems in the new environment. This paper describes two approaches to solve such problems in the context of case-based reasoning systems. The first one is maintaining descriptions of applicable scopes of cases through generalization and specialization. The generalization is performed to expand problem descriptions, i. e. descriptions of applicable scopes of cases. On the other hand, the specialization is performed to narrow problem descriptions of cases which failed to be applied to given problems with the aim of dealing with environmental changes. The second approach is forgetting, that is deleting obsolete cases from the case-base. However, the domain-dependent knowledge is necessary for testing obsolescence of cases and that causes the problem of knowledge acquisition. We adopt the strategies used by conventional learning systems and extend them using the least domain-dependent knowledge. These two approaches for adapting the case-base to the environment are evaluated through simulations in the domain of electric power systems.