Challenges and Solutions on the Road Toward Smart Lighting With Projected LED Arrays

Automated, adaptive lighting systems based on LED arrays offer significant potential for general lighting applications. Unlike conventional lighting systems, LED arrays enable real-time, spatially adaptive illumination by dimming individual LED pixels through camera-detected environmental features. While already mature in the automotive industry, the translation of LED array technology to general lighting comes with various key challenges, limiting their broader adoption: (1) current high-resolution LED arrays are optimized for automotive use; (2) existing projection optics have low efficiency; and (3) determining optimal LED activation patterns from camera data is non-trivial. This manuscript identifies these challenges in-depth, followed by possible solutions. These solutions are then combined and integrated into a fully automated adaptive lighting system with LED array technology. This demonstration is followed by a discussion of the system's shortcomings, concluding that LED array technology for general lighting remains in an early stage but holds significant promise for future development.