Smart Video Systems in Police Cars

poster abstractThe use of video cameras in police cars has been found to have significant value and the number of such installed systems has been increasing. In addition to recording the events in routine traffic stops for later use in legal settings, in-car video cameras can be used to analyze in real-time or near real-time to detect critical events and notify police headquarters for help. This poster presents methods for detecting critical events in such police car videos. The specific critical events are person running out of a stopped car and officer falling down while approaching a stopped car. In the above situations, the aim is to alert the control center immediately for backup forces, especially in the last example when the officer is incapacitated. In order to implement real-time video processing so that a quick response can be generated without employing complex, slow, and brittle video processing algorithms, we use the reduced spatiotemporal representation (1D projection profile) and Hidden Markov Model to detect these events. The methods are tested on many video shots under various environmental and illumination conditions

EYES : a novel overtaking assistance system for vehicular networks

Developments in the ITS area are received with great expectation by both consumers and industry. Despite their huge potential benefits, ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers. In this paper we propose EYES, an ITS system that aims at helping drivers in overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network of the devices running EYES, and provides drivers with a video feed from the vehicle located just ahead, thus presenting a better view of any vehicles coming from the opposite direction and the road ahead. This is specially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles, and thus the decision whether to overtake can be taken based on the visuals provided by the application. We have validated EYES, the proposed overtaking assistance system, in both indoor and realistic scenarios involving vehicular network, and preliminary results allow being optimistic about its effectiveness and applicability

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving