Biblio

Automobiles provide comfort and mobility to owners. While they make life more meaningful they also pose challenges and risks in their safety and security mechanisms. Some modern automobiles are equipped with anti-theft systems and enhanced safety measures to safeguard its drivers. But at times, these mechanisms for safety and secured operation of automobiles are insufficient due to various mechanisms used by intruders and car thieves to defeat them. Drunk drivers cause accidents on our roads and thus the need to safeguard the driver when he is intoxicated and render the car to be incapable of being driven. These issues merit an integrated approach to safety and security of automobiles. In the light of these challenges, an integrated microcontroller-based hardware and software system for safety and security of automobiles to be fixed into existing vehicle architecture, was designed, developed and deployed. The system submodules are: (1) Two-step ignition for automobiles, namely: (a) biometric ignition and (b) alcohol detection with engine control, (2) Global Positioning System (GPS) based vehicle tracking and (3) Multisensor-based fire detection using neuro-fuzzy logic. All submodules of the system were implemented using one microcontroller, the Arduino Mega 2560, as the central control unit. The microcontroller was programmed using C++11. The developed system performed quite well with the tests performed on it. Given the right conditions, the alcohol detection subsystem operated with a 92% efficiency. The biometric ignition subsystem operated with about 80% efficiency. The fire detection subsystem operated with a 95% efficiency in locations registered with the neuro-fuzzy system. The vehicle tracking subsystem operated with an efficiency of 90%.

Autonomous vehicles must communicate with each other effectively and securely to make robust decisions. However, today's Internet falls short in supporting efficient data delivery and strong data security, especially in a mobile ad-hoc environment. Named Data Networking (NDN), a new data-centric Internet architecture, provides a better foundation for secure data sharing among autonomous vehicles. We examine two potential threats, false data dissemination and vehicle tracking, in an NDN-based autonomous vehicular network. To detect false data, we propose a four-level hierarchical trust model and the associated naming scheme for vehicular data authentication. Moreover, we address vehicle tracking concerns using a pseudonym scheme to anonymize vehicle names and certificate issuing proxies to further protect vehicle identity. Finally, we implemented and evaluated our AutoNDN application on Raspberry Pi-based mini cars in a wireless environment.

The technology of vehicle video detecting and tracking has been playing an important role in the ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) field during recent years. The occlusion phenomenon among vehicles is one of the most difficult problems related to vehicle tracking. In order to handle occlusion, this paper proposes an effective solution that applied Markov Random Field (MRF) to the traffic images. The contour of the vehicle is firstly detected by using background subtraction, then numbers of blocks with vehicle's texture and motion information are filled inside each vehicle. We extract several kinds of information of each block to process the following tracking. As for each occlusive block two groups of clique functions in MRF model are defined, which represents spatial correlation and motion coherence respectively. By calculating each occlusive block's total energy function, we finally solve the attribution problem of occlusive blocks. The experimental results show that our method can handle occlusion problems effectively and track each vehicle continuously.