AFFECTIVE COMPUTING AND AUGMENTED REALITY FOR CAR DRIVING SIMULATORS

Car simulators are essential for training and for analyzing the behavior, the responses and the performance of the driver. Augmented Reality (AR) is the technology that enables virtual images to be overlaid on views of the real world. Affective Computing (AC) is the technology that helps reading emotions by means of computer systems, by analyzing body gestures, facial expressions, speech and physiological signals. The key aspect of the research relies on investigating novel interfaces that help building situational awareness and emotional awareness, to enable affect-driven remote collaboration in AR for car driving simulators. The problem addressed relates to the question about how to build situational awareness (using AR technology) and emotional awareness (by AC technology), and how to integrate these two distinct technologies [4], into a unique affective framework for training, in a car driving simulator

A Multiprocessor Platform Based on FPGA Technology Targeted for a Driver Vigilance Monitoring Device

Medical devices processing images or audio or executing complex AI algorithms are able to run more efficiently and meet real time requirements if the parallelism in those algorithms is exploited. In this research a methodology is proposed to exploit the flexibility and short design cycle of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) in order to achieve this target. Hardware/software co-design and dynamic partitioning allow the optimization of the multiprocessor platform design parameters and software code targeting each core to meet real time constraints. This is practically demonstrated by building a real life driver vigilance monitoring system based on visual cues extraction and evaluation. The application drives the whole design process to prove its effectiveness. An algorithm was built to achieve the goal of detecting the eye state of the driver (open or closed) and it is applied on captured consecutive frames to evaluate the vigilance state of the driver. Vigilance state is measured depending on duration of eye closure. This video processing application is then targeted to run on a multi-core FPGA based processing platform using the proposed methodology. Results obtained were very good using the Grimace Face Database and when operating the system on one’s face. On operating the device, a false positive of eye closure must take place two consecutive times in order to get an alarm, which decreases the probability of failure. The timing analysis applied proved the importance of using the concept of parallelism to achieve performance constraints. FPGA technology proved to be a very powerful prototyping tool for complex multiprocessor systems design. The flexible FPGA technology coupled with hardware/software co-design provided means to explore the design space and reach decisions that satisfy the design constraints with minimum time investment and cost