###### Abstract
As [PERSON] shows, even for oncoming traffic at night it is beneficial for the human eye to add light into the direct surroundings of those vehicles to minimize glare effects and help with short-term adaptation in the presence of light sources from oncoming traffic. Numerous investigations of visibility requirements from advanced headlighting systems and illumination needs for visually guided behavior have been undertaken by [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18]. When looking at different situations, it becomes obvious that a traffic space analysis from the driver's view should be split into at least three different sections: urban roads, country roads and motorways. Driving in urban environments will lead to completely different lighting situations due to the presence of fixed road lighting, advertisements and much denser traffic. [PERSON] has proposed a dynamic lighting function that limits the light output on urban roads based on a constant luminance level. Since the main light in urban environments comes from fixed road lighting, additional lighting from the car's headlamps can be limited [19]. Country roads could be regarded as the standard road for headlight distributions. They have relatively simple road layouts, with mostly one lane in each direction. Fixed road lighting is rare, there is reduced traffic density, driving speeds are often limited to (on average) 80 km h\({}^{-1}\), and as shown by [PERSON], there is a nearly normal distribution for the road curvature [4]. Motorways on the other hand can be rather complicated, with at least two lanes but sometimes four or more lanes in each direction. There can also be vastly different driven speeds, between 60 km h\({}^{-1}\) and even unlimited speeds on some motorways in Germany. Depending on which lane a vehicle is in, the requirements for the headlight distribution will change due to the speed, the position of other vehicles when they are passing or are being passed and the possible relative speeds between vehicles. Furthermore, traffic signs are often located at different positions compared to urban and country roads. One possibly simplifying factor is that no pedestrians and cyclists are allowed on motorways. However, as already indicated by the different situations that may occur on motorways, the same differentiation is also easily possible for urban roads with different intersections, different ambient lighting situations, different traffic scenarios and more. The optimum for the driver would be an unlimited number of light distributions that could easily and seamlessly be produced by the headlight at the appropriate time. These papers therefore propose a novel approach to achieving these light distributions. Additionally, the data acquired here are used to optimize the size of individual LED segments for adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlamps. Such a method was proposed by [PERSON], [PERSON] and some authors of this paper [20; 21; 22]. However, the proposal of [PERSON] was based on a logical analysis and was not backed-up by empirical data. The proposal shown by [PERSON], which was based on a simulation, seemed to result in illogical distributions in some cases. The proposal presented previously by the authors of this paper seemed to yield appropriate outcomes but was only based on simulation data as well. Thus, one of the overall objectives is to validate those simulations with real traffic data and identify differences that were not covered by the simulation data. In this investigation, it was of course necessary to select a finite roadway environment along which to record geometric and traffic conditions. As is described below, it is hoped that this environment is representative of roads in Europe, or at least in Germany. It must be recognized that the success of the headlight beam distributions to be derived from this analysis will depend on the extent to which the test course we selected is indeed representative of real-world general conditions.