automotive system developers

Abstract: Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can improve road safety and traffic efficiency, yet its deployment remains limited by the need for dedicated communication hardware and supporting infrastructure. Meanwhile, production vehicles are already widely equipped with millimeter-wave radars for sensing. To unlock their communication potential, this paper presents RadarCom, a software-defined system that enables direct radar-to-radar communication on unmodified commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) automotive mmWave radars while preserving their native sensing functionality. The key insight is that mutual inter-radar interference, traditionally viewed as harmful, can be repurposed as a communication carrier. Based on this insight, RadarCom introduces slope-mismatch-based discovery, adaptive chirp synchronization, differential coding on range-FFT, and sensing-aware interference suppression to enable simultaneous communication and sensing without hardware modification, waveform redesign, or infrastructure support. We implement RadarCom on TI AWR2243 automotive radars and evaluate it under static, dynamic, and challenging real-world conditions. Results show an average effective data rate of 5.55 kbps with symbol error rates below 1.5%, while maintaining sensing F1 scores of up to 80.5% during concurrent communication. These results demonstrate the feasibility of transforming commodity automotive radars into dual-purpose communication and sensing devices.

Abstract: Urban environments present significant challenges for the perception systems of automated driving due to their high complexity, characterized by dense traffic, diverse obstacles, or a wide range of possible scenarios. While numerous automotive datasets exist, few focus on urban settings, and the majority are acquired exclusively on passenger cars and overlook other transport modalities such as heavy-duty trucks, busses and trams. In contrast to passenger vehicles, these platforms operate under different geographical and operational constraints; including traversing pedestrian zones or platform-specific tasks such as movement of trailer or winter service. In this work a method is proposed for a guided dataset creation based on an analysis of existing datasets using user-generated map data. Furthermore, representative truck-specific use cases are identified and exemplified to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology and to support targeted acquisition planning.

Abstract: Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) offers a promising non-contact solution for heart rate monitoring, yet its real-world robustness is fundamentally limited by an inherent hardware limitation: existing camera exposure control paradigms, whether fixed or auto-exposure, impose a uniform exposure time across all pixels within a frame. In high-dynamic-range scenes such as automotive cabins with strong directional sunlight, this spatially invariant exposure constraint inevitably leads to localized facial overexposure or underexposure, irreversibly corrupting the subtle pulsatile signals essential for rPPG at the point of capture, a physical degradation that no downstream algorithm can recover. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose PixExpo (Pixel-wise Exposure), a "temporal-for-spatial" framework that sequentially captures frames under a predefined cyclic exposure schedule and performs non-iterative pixel-wise fusion. At each pixel location, PixExpo selects the observation closest to an rPPG-motivated target intensity. This criterion seeks to reduce local saturation and severe underexposure rather than optimize perceptual appearance. PixExpo requires no sensor modification but assumes programmable frame-level exposure control. We validate the proposed PixExpo framework using our newly introduced MEX-Drive dataset, comprising 48 participants under real-world driving conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that PixExpo outperforms manufacture-default auto-exposure methods, reducing the mean absolute error (MAE) by 7.21 bpm (from 13.94 to 6.73 bpm) and increasing the success rate by 37.29 percentage points (from 25.95% to 63.24%) across challenging driving scenarios.

Abstract: One in every five vehicle accidents on the road today is caused simply due to driver fatigue. Fatigue or otherwise drowsiness, significantly reduces the concentration and vigilance of the driver thereby increasing the risk of inherent human error leading to injuries and fatalities. Hence, our primary motive being - to reduce road accidents using a non-intrusive image processing based alert system. In this regard, we have built a system that detects driver drowsiness by real time tracking and monitoring the pattern of the driver's eyes. The stand alone system consists of 3 interconnected components - a processor, a camera and an alarm. After initial facial detection, the eyes are located, extracted and continuously monitored to check whether they are open or closed on the basis of a pixel-by-pixel method. When the eyes are seen to be closed for a certain amount of time, drowsiness is said to be detected and an alarm is issued accordingly to alert the driver and hence, prevent a casualty.

Abstract: Real-time video analytics is crucial for smart city applications and cloud-connected vehicle control. To improve analytics accuracy, it is desirable to process the video at the highest resolution and frame rate. However, due to limited resources, streaming and processing video at the highest resolution and frame rate from all cameras is not feasible and adversely affects the analytics latency. Intelligent adaptation of cameras' resolutions and frame rates based on network conditions and the video content is crucial in order to optimize the performance. In this paper, we present ASTRA, a low-overhead runtime architecture for online adaptation of live camera analytics at the edge. ASTRA can execute various online algorithms as a black box. We deployed ASTRA in the realistic NSF COSMOS testbed and uniquely assessed its real-time performance using COSMOS' street-level cameras. We further evaluated ASTRA with up to eight emulated cameras by streaming a comprehensive video dataset under real-world network conditions. We used ASTRA's architecture to evaluate the practical performance of several classes of adaptation algorithms, including theoretical and empirical methods. The results indicate that ASTRA can provide system reliability (i.e., the probability of meeting accuracy and latency requirements) of more than 90% while maintaining performance within a deviation of less than 10% from optimal offline performance with average GPU utilization overhead of around 2% per camera.

Abstract: Electromagnetic signal injection attacks (ESIA) pose a growing threat to image sensors, which are increasingly used in different intelligent systems. By emitting electromagnetic interference, adversaries can manipulate pixel values, potentially misleading downstream artificial intelligence (AI) models and causing unsafe decisions in these systems. We present a lightweight detection method that leverages optically black pixels, which are non-exposed pixels already present in many modern image sensors, to identify the attacks. Our detection approach achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of up to 99.6\% and an Equal Error Rate (EER) as low as 0.027 across diverse attack conditions. Our method requires minimal computational overhead and no hardware modifications, making it a practical and effective defense for securing vision-based systems against ESIA.