Development of an automated testing system for vehicle infotainment system

A current premium vehicle is implemented with a variety of information, entertainment, and communication functions, which are generally referred as an infotainment system. During vehicle development, testing of the infotainment system at an overall level is conventionally carried out manually by an expert who can observe at a customer level. This approach has significant limitations with regard to test coverage and effectiveness due to the complexity of the system functions and human’s capability. Hence, it is highly demanded by car manufacturers for an automated infotainment testing system, which replicates a human expert encompassing relevant sensory modalities relating to control (i.e., touch) and observation (i.e., sight and sound) of the system under test. This paper describes the design, development, and evaluation of such a system that consists of simulation of vehicle network, vision-based inspection, automated navigation of features, random cranking waveform generation, sound detection, and test automation. The system developed is able to: stimulate a vehicle system across a wide variety of initialisation conditions, exercise each function, check for system responses, and record failure situations for post-testing analysis.     

On the use of genuine-impostor statistical information for score fusion in multimodal biometrics/sur l’usage de l’information statistioue client-imposteur pour la fusion des scores en biométrie multimodale

Matching score level fusion techniques in multimodal person verification conventionally use global score statistics in the normalization and fusion stages. In this paper, novel normalization and fusion methods are presented to take advantage of the separate statistics of the monomodal scores in order to reduce the genuine and impostor pdf lobe overlapping and improve the verification rate. Joint mean normalization is an affine transformation that normalizes the mean of the monomodal biometrics scores separately for the genuine and impostor individuals. Histogram equalization is used to align the statistical distribution of the monomodal scores and make the whole separate statistics comparable. The presented weighting fusion methods have been designed to minimize the variances of the separate multimodal statistics and reduce the multimodal pdf lobe overlapping. The results obtained in speech and face scores fusion upon polycost and xm2vts databases show that the proposed techniques provide better results than the conventional methods.     

改进缺陷,套刻和聚焦性能的第五世代浸没式曝光系统

论述了第五世代双扫描平台浸液式扫描曝光机的性能和进展。表明了在高速扫描状态下有生产价值的套刻和聚焦性能的实现。浸液式设备更多的关键部分与缺陷有关,而且该机的改进是通过有生产价值的缺陷水平方面来体现的。为了保持这种缺陷水平的改进效果,需要在圆片应用中进行专门稳定的测量。特加是边缘空泡除去(EBR)设计和圆片斜面良流线性是很重要的。     

Accuracy of carotid strain estimates from ultrasonic wall tracking: a study based on multiphysics simulations and in vivo data

We used a multiphysics model to assess the accuracy of carotid strain estimates derived from a 1-D ultrasonic wall tracking algorithm. The presented tool integrates fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations with an ultrasound simulator (Field II), which allows comparison of the ultrasound (US) images with a ground truth. Field II represents tissue as random points on which US waves reflect and whose position can be updated based on the flow field and vessel wall deformation from FSI. We simulated the RF-signal of a patient-specific carotid bifurcation, including the blood pool as well as the vessel wall and surrounding tissue. Distension estimates were obtained from a wall tracking algorithm using tracking points at various depths within the wall, and further processed to assess radial and circumferential strain. The simulated data demonstrated that circumferential strain can be estimated with reasonable accuracy (especially for the common carotid artery and at the lumen-intima and media-adventitia interface), but the technique does not allow to reliably assess intra-arterial radial strain. These findings were supported by in vivo data of 10 healthy adults, showing similar circumferential and radial strain profiles throughout the arterial wall. We concluded that these deviations are present due to the complex 3-D vessel wall deformation, the presence of specular reflections and, to a lesser extent, the spatially varying beam profile, with the error depending on the phase in the cardiac cycle and the scanning location.     

Interdigitated back‐contact heterojunction solar cell concept for liquid phase crystallized thin‐film silicon on glass

We present an interdigitated back‐contact silicon heterojunction system designed for liquid‐phase crystallized thin‐film (~10 µm) silicon on glass. The preparation of the interdigitated emitter (a‐Si:H(p)) and absorber (a‐Si:H(n)) contact layers relies on the etch selectivity of doped amorphous silicon layers in alkaline solutions. The etch rates of a‐Si:H(n) and a‐Si:H(p) in 0.6% NaOH were determined and interdigitated back‐contact silicon heterojunction solar cells with two different metallizations, namely Al and ITO/Ag electrodes, were evaluated regarding electrical and optical properties. An additional random pyramid texture on the back side provides short‐circuit current density (j_SC) of up to 30.3 mA/cm² using the ITO/Ag metallization. The maximum efficiency of 10.5% is mainly limited by a low of fill factor of 57%. However, the high j_SC, as well as V_OC values of 633 mV and pseudo‐fill factors of 77%, underline the high potential of this approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A subspace matching color filter design methodology for a multispectral imaging system.

In this paper, we present a methodology to design filters for an imaging system to improve the accuracy of the spectral measurements for families of reflective surfaces. We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions that the sensor space of the system must obey in order to measure the spectral reflectance of the surfaces accurately. Through simulations, we show how these conditions can be applied to design filters using a set of sample spectral data acquired from extracted teeth. For this set of data, we also compare our results to those of Wolski's method, a conventional filter design method which produces filters that recover tristimulus values of surfaces accurately under several illuminants. We show that our method produces filters that capture the spectral reflectance better given the same number of measurements. The errors in predicting the color of the sample data are much lower under every test illuminant when the filters designed with our method are used.     

Power and Speed-Efficient Code Transformation of Video Compression Algorithms for RISC Processors

Upcoming multi-media compression applications will require high memory bandwidth. In this paper, we estimate that a software reference implementation of an MPEG-4 video decoder typically requires 200 Mtransfers/s to memory to decode 1 CIF (352×288) Video Object Plane (VOP) at 30 frames/s. This imposes a high penalty in terms of power but also performance.However, we also show that we can heavily improve on the memory transfers, without sacrificing speed (even gaining about 10% on cache misses and cycles for a DEC Alpha), by aggressive code transformations. For this purpose, we have manually applied an extended version of our data transfer and storage exploration (DTSE) methodology, which was originally developed for custom hardware implementations.     

Increasing inequalities in what we do online: A longitudinal cross sectional analysis of Internet activities among the Dutch population (2010 to 2013) over gender,age, education,and income

We investigate types of Internet activities among a representative sample of the Dutch population from 2010 to 2013. We examined usage patterns of seven types of Internet activities (i.e., information, news, personal development, commercial transaction, social interaction, leisure, and gaming) and related these patterns with gender, age, education, and income. Activities related to news, personal development, commercial transaction, and social interaction increased in popularity. For most capital enhancing activities, men, younger people, higher educated people, and people with higher than average incomes were prominent. These observations, however, are subject to change. The Internet seems to provide increasingly more capital-enhancing opportunities for those with higher education and income, which would accordingly reinforce their already strong positions in society.     

A Scalable Architecture for MPEG-4 Wavelet Quantization

Wavelet-based image compression has been adopted in MPEG-4 for visual texture coding. All wavelet quantization schemes in MPEG-4—Single Quantization (SQ), Multiple Quantization (MQ) and Bi-level Quantization—use Embedded Zero Tree (EZT) coding followed by an adaptive arithmetic coder for the compression and quantization of a wavelet image. This paper presents the OZONE chip, a dedicated hardware coprocessor for EZT and arithmetic coding. Realized in a 0.5 m CMOS technology and operating at 32 MHz, the EZT coder is capable of processing up to 25.6 Mega pixel-bitplanes per second. This is equivalent to the lossless compression of 31.6 8-bit grayscale CIF images (352 × 288) per second. The adaptive arithmetic coder processes up to 10 Mbit per second. The combination of the performance of the EZT coder and the arithmetic coder allows the OZONE to perform visual-lossless compression of more than 30 CIF images per second. Due to its novel and scalable architecture, parallel operation of multiple OZONEs is supported. The OZONE functionality is demonstrated on a PC-based compression system.     

Determination of Thermoelectric Module Efficiency: A Survey

The development of thermoelectrics (TE) for energy conversion is in the transition phase from laboratory research to device development. There is an increasing demand to accurately determine the module efficiency, especially for the power generation mode. For many TE, the figure of merit, ZT, of the material sometimes cannot be fully realized at the device level. Reliable efficiency testing of thermoelectric modules is important to assess the device ZT and provide end-users with realistic values for how much power can be generated under specific conditions. We conducted a general survey of efficiency testing devices and their performance. The results indicated a lack of industry standards and test procedures. This study included a commercial test system and several laboratory systems. Most systems are based on the heat flow meter method, and some are based on the Harman method. They are usually reproducible in evaluating thermoelectric modules. However, different systems often showed large differences that are likely caused by uncertain heat loss and thermal resistance. Efficiency testing is an important capability for the thermoelectric community to improve. A follow-up international standardization effort is planned.