Scientists have created a smart car headlight that enables drivers to see through even the heaviest rain or snow.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been working on the smart headlights since 2012. They work by turning off tiny portions of the beam that correspond to the falling water, meaning it does not reflect off the droplets and reduce visibility.

Normally drivers often have to drive with dimmed beams in heavy rain or snow so they can see, but the new headlights allow them to use high beams to illuminate* the road ahead.

They have also been able to use their programmable* headlights to detect oncoming traffic and so dim a portion of the light to avoid blinding oncoming drivers.

Takeo Kanade, a computer scientist at the university who helped lead the team behind the technology, said: “Rain does not fall very fast, only about 10 meters per second, so we can track them with a camera and turn off the corresponding ray of light.”

The programmable headlights work by replacing the traditional bulb and LEDs in headlights with a device similar to that found in cinema projectors, called a digital micromirror chip.

These feature thousands of tiny mirrors that can be individually controlled by flipping them up and down at high speed. By shining a bright light onto one of these chips, it becomes possible to dim small sections of a headlight on demand.(SD-Agencies)