Electronic Nervous System for the Modern Vehicle

Driver assistance system using cameras and sensors is about to have dramatic effect on the automobile. The article by Christoph Hammerschmidt from EETimes Europe provided a glance on the state of the art on CMOS image sensors and DSP technologies applied in driver assistance systems. As an outlook, the article also revealed that driver assistance systems are evolving to a kind of electronic nervous system for the modern car, which is able to perform lane maintaining, traffic sign recognition, pedestrian recognition and even virtual situation imaging using car-to-car communication.

The article is available at: The thinking car sees a clear road ahead @ EETimes Dec. 2008

EU Project EVITA on Intrusion Protected Vehicular Applications

Trusted Cars

The newly launched EU-Project EVITA aims at the information security in vehicular communications, e.g. for the toll collection or safety applications.

In the future, vehicles would be able to warning the driver about approaching dangers by using wireless coommunication technologies. However, to have these application running available on the market, the probelm of information security has to be solved. The goal of EU-Project EVITA is "a system that can protect both safety relevant componets in the car and the communications among different units from manipulation", as stated by the project coordinator Dr. Olaf Henniger.  

The EU funds this 3-year project with 3.8 Million euro, and other cost are from the project partners.  The participants include: BMW Forschung und Technik GmbH, Robert Bosch GmbH, Continental Teves AG & Co. OHG, escrypt GmbH, EURECOM, Fraunhofer ISI, Fujitsu Services AB, Infineon Technologies AG, die Universität Löwen, MIRA Ltd., Institut TELECOM/ParisTech und TRIALOG.

Original release (in German): : http://www.sit.fraunhofer.de/pressedownloads/pressemitteilungen/20080819.jsp 

EVITA poject Website:

http://evita-project.org/