Car Infotainment Systems Research Articles

V-Cockpit: A Platform for the Design, Testing, and Validation of Car Infotainment Systems through Virtual Reality

V-Cockpit: A Platform for the Design, Testing, and Validation of Car Infotainment Systems through Virtual Reality

Lightweight, Effective Detection and Characterization of Mobile Malware Families

Android malware is an ongoing threat to billions of smart devices’ security, ranging from mobile phones to car infotainment systems. Despite numerous approaches and previous studies to develop solutions for detecting and preventing Android malware, the rapid continuous development of new malware variants requires a careful reconsideration and the development of effective methods to identify malware families given a meager number of malware instances. In this paper, we present DroidMalVet, a novel Android malware family classification and detection approach that does not require to perform complex program analyses or utilize large feature sets. DroidMalVet is the first to use a promising, diverse, and small set of software metrics as features in a supervised learning platform to classify and detect various Android malware families. Our extensive empirical evaluations on two large public malware datasets show that DroidMalVet accurately detects both small and large malware families with F-Score accuracy of 94.4% and 96%, and AUC equal to 99.5% and 99.7% on the malware families in Drebin and AMD datasets, respectively. Moreover, our results demonstrate the superior performance of DroidMalVet in detecting small families (i.e., families with few samples). DroidMalVet complements existing approaches and presents an early warning tool for detecting known and emerging malware families.

An Update From the 5G Media Action Group (5G-MAG)

Connectivity is becoming a key element in the production and distribution of multimedia content to address audiences worldwide. The development and use of technologies traditionally optimized for specific media applications are steadily being replaced by technologies playing in the global consumer market domain and able to rapidly evolve. The plethora of devices now able to consume media content, and the freedom given to users in doing so is massive. Connected devices now include smart TVs, PCs, smartphones, tablets, car infotainment systems, smart speakers, as well as smart glasses, or head-mounted devices. The focus on media content is shifting from just linear to more interactive, social, even gaming-like, location-dependent, targeted, personalized and immersive.

An Embedded System for Acoustic Data Processing and AI-Based Real-Time Classification for Road Surface Analysis

The current roadway monitoring is expensive and not systematic. This paper proposes a new system able to evaluate the pavement quality of road infrastructure. The embedded system records and processes the acoustic data of the wheel-road interaction and classifies in real-time roadways’ health thanks to integrated AI solutions. The measurements to produce the dataset to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) were collected using a vehicle operating at different cruise speeds in the area of Pisa. The dataset is composed by acoustic data belonging to several typologies of roads: dirty or grass roads, high roughness surfaces and roads with cracks or potholes. The raw audio signals were split, labelled, and converted into images by calculating the Mel spectrogram. Finally, the authors designed a tiny CNN with a size equal to 18 kB able to classify between four different classes: good quality road, ruined road, silence and unknown. The CNN architecture achieves an accuracy of about 93% on the original model and 90% on the quantized one. Quantization permits to convert the final architecture into a suitable form to be deployed on a low-complex embedded system integrated in the tyre cavity. In addition, a custom board was designed to act as IoT node thanks to a Bluetooth Low Energy communication towards smartphones and/or car infotainment systems. These systems, featured with GPS, guarantee to obtain real-time maps service of road quality. At authors’ knowledge, this is the first real-time and fully integrated solution at the state of the art for road pavement quality analysis and classification on acoustic data.

On the performance of WLAN and Bluetooth for in-car infotainment systems

The connected car is ushering in a new era of automotive design. Driven by increasing customer demand for connectivity and advances in electronics, connected cars are now equipped with advanced infotainment systems with a variety of applications. Seamless integration of consumer electronic (CE) devices into car infotainment systems is crucial for mimicking home and office user experience. Because wireless communication is more user-friendly than wired communication, it has become the preferred method for connecting CE devices to car infotainment systems. WLAN1and Bluetooth2are the most promising technologies for this purpose. Both systems operate in the spectrum-scarce 2.4 GHz unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio band. The coexistence between WLAN and Bluetooth has garnered a significant amount of attention from both academic and industry researchers. However, the unique features of vehicle mobility and the high density of devices in a limited roadway area necessitate further investigation in the automotive domain.This paper focuses on the coexistence between WLAN and Bluetooth systems among vehicle infotainment applications, and on WLAN co-channel interference. Performance is evaluated using experimental measurements in real-world scenarios. The mobility effect is studied in detail. Results show that an onboard WLAN network is strongly affected by the surrounding networks. Coexistence duration decreases exponentially with relative speed between automobile networks. WLAN effect on Bluetooth is extremely high when WLAN's non-overlapped channels 1, 6, and 11 are simultaneously occupied. WLAN interference leads to a significant number of clippings in Bluetooth audio signals, especially in high WLAN traffic load situations. An exponential decease in the number of clipping events as a function of speed is observed.

Product Lines, Energy Conservation, Use Cases, Agile Development, and Infotainment

This issue's column reports on papers from the 19th International Conference on Software Product Lines, the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, the 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, and the 9th European Conference on Software Architecture. Topics include software product lines, Android app GUI energy consumption, use case changes, combining architecture with agile development, and car infotainment systems. You can access slides of the talk Connected Infotainment Systems: The Internet of Things in the Car at https://extras.computer.org/extra/mso2016030029s1.pdf.

53.3: Invited Paper: Creating a Compelling Touch Experience

Touchscreen car infotainment systems now offer a larger variety and a more complex set of use cases than ever. Haptics have the potential to improve safety, utility, and user experience of these touch‐based systems. This paper will cover some haptic design considerations and discuss how to create compelling haptic experiences in a touchscreen infotainment system.

Software generated device exception for more intensive device-related software testing: An industrial field study

It is more important to properly handle exceptions, than to prevent exceptions from occurring, because they arise from so many different causes. In embedded systems, a vast number of exceptions are caused by hardware devices. In such cases, numerous software components are involved in these hardware device-originated exceptions, ranging from the device itself to the device driver, the kernel, and applications. Therefore, it takes a lot of time to debug software that fails to handle exceptions. This paper proposes a lightweight device exception testing method, and a related automation tool, AMOS v3.0. The proposed method artificially triggers more realistic device exceptions in runtime, and monitors how software components handle exceptions in detail. AMOS v3.0 has been applied to the exception testing of car-infotainment systems in an automobile company. The results based on this industrial field study have revealed that 39.13% of the failures in exception handling were caused by applications, 36.23% of the failures were caused by device drivers, and 24.64% were derived from the kernel. We conclude that the proposed method is highly effective, in that it can allow developers to identify the root cause of failure for exception handling.

무선 랜을 이용한 MOST 네트워크 진단 시스템의 설계 및 구현

자동차의 사용자 편의 및 안전에 대한 다양한 요구로 전장 장치의 수가 증가함에 따라 이들 장치들을 보다 효과적으로 제어할 수 있도록 네트워크를 이용한 전장 시스템이 구축되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 MOST 네트워크로 연결된 장치들과 네트워크의 상태를 진단하고 이들을 효과적으로 관리하기 위하여 무선 랜을 이용한 MOST 네트워크진단 시스템을 설계 및 구현하였다. 차량 멀티미디어 네트워크 표준인 MOST는 최근 자동차의 인포테인먼트 시스템 구축에 적용되고 있으며 이를 적용한 다양한 장치들이 개발되고 있다. 본 논문에서 구현한 무선 진단 시스템은 MOST 네트워크 자가 진단뿐만 아니라 MOST 전장 장치의 상태를 진단하여 오류를 미리 판단할 수 있으며, 무선 랜으로 연결하여 언제든지 휴대형 이동 단말기를 통해서도 차량 내부 MOST 네트워크 시스템의 상태를 확인 및 관리할 수 있다. According to increase of the number of electronic devices for user comfort and safety, electronic systems are being constructed by using network to effectively control the devices. In this paper, we design and implement the MOST network diagnostic system by using wireless LAN to diagnose MOST network and the devices connected by the network and to effectively manage them. MOST, which is a vehicle multimedia network standard for the next generation, is being used for construction of car infotainment systems, and enables to develop various devices which are required for them. The wireless diagnostic system implemented in this paper enables to self-diagnose MOST network and also to check errors by diagnosing status of MOST electronic devices. We also can check and manage status of a in-vehicle MOST network system using mobile devices based on wireless LAN.

Consumers automotive purchase decisions: The significance of vehicle-based infotainment systems

A car infotainment system (CIS) is an information system supporting driving behaviour and providing entertainment activities, it can enrich the basic functions of a car, and is a valuable product. This paper investigates which CIS value factors affect consumers' car purchase intentions. A questionnaire survey collected responses from a sample of 319 consumers, and a structure equation model was used as the analytical method. The results found show that a CIS possesses value when it is useful or provides driving safety, and in that case consumers will exhibit greater tendency to purchase a car. In addition, high price or perceived risk will affect the value of a CIS such that consumers with less tendency to purchase a car. This study also discusses some practical implications for car manufacturers and auto electronics. This paper ultimately seeks to facilitate the future development of the auto market. Key words: Car infotainment systems (CIS), perceived value, purchase intention, purchase car.

Infotainment with smart phone coverage

It is hard to explain to car owners why their car infotainment systems are lagging so far behind the developments in the mobile telephony sector — quite rightly, since, with the Android open platform, even functions whose development would have until now exceeded any budget can now be integrated. Manufacturers also profit from a growing number of solutions for embedded software development which support Android, describes Wind River.

A profiling method by PCB hooking and its application for memory fault detection in embedded system operational test

Context An operational test means a system test that examines whether or not all software or hardware components comply with the requirements given to a system which is deployed in an operational environment. Objective It is a necessary lightweight-profiling method for embedded systems with severe resource restrictions to conduct operational testing. Method We focus on the Process Control Block as the optimal location to monitor the execution of all processes. We propose a profiling method to collect the runtime execution information of the processes without interrupting the system’s operational environment by hacking the Process Control Block information. Based on the proposed method applied to detect runtime memory faults, we develop the operational testing tool AMOS v1.0 which is currently being used in the automobile industry. Results An industrial field study on 23 models of car-infotainment systems revealed a total of 519 memory faults while only slowing down the system by 0.084–0.132×. We conducted a comparative analysis on representative runtime memory fault detection tools. This analysis result shows our proposed method that has relatively low overhead meets the requirements for operational testing, while other methods failed to satisfy the operational test conditions. Conclusion We conclude that a lightweight-profiling method for embedded system operational testing can be built around the Process Control Block.

Architecture of an infotainment framework for all purpose control units

As an automotive supplier and provider of various products for info- tainment, multi media and communication purposes, Funkwerk has designed and developed a component based software framework that makes the development of complex car control units much easier. The demonstrated concept allows the reuse of existing components. It is platform independent and supports an efficient product develop- ment process, including Rapid Prototyping and automated tests. Com- bined with COQOS next generation car infotainment systems can be integrated also in an Autosar environment.

Developing Quantitative Metrics to Predict Users' Perceptions of Interface Design

Users' perceptions of an interface play an important role in influencing their acceptance of a product. Currently, however, designers lack an objective method to predict users' perceptions and to guide decisions during the design process. We propose a statistical image analysis method that takes the user interface as an input and computes image features that can be used to inform design. Based on these metrics, we then implemented a supervised learning algorithm to predict users' perceptions. We tested this method with a case study involving car infotainment systems. The results showed that the algorithm can capture users' perceptual ratings quite well, in particular for the perceptions of clutter vs. organized, and aggressive vs. calm. We discuss the implications of this computational method for UI design.

Realtime operating systems in automotive infotainment

A variety of new technologies are converging in car infotainment systems. The associated increase in system complexity presents a significant challenge to both security and reliability. To address this challenge, car infotainment systems need an operating system (OS) that can provide extreme fault tolerance while making optimal use of limited CPU and memory resources. This article by QNX Software Systems presents the modular operating system QNX Neutrino RTOS that can be adjusted to today's complex requirements.

EMBASSI multimodal assistance for infotainment and service infrastructures

EMBASSI is a joint research project with 19 partners from industry and academia. Its focus is the development of new paradigms and architectures for the intuitive interaction with technical infrastructures of everyday life, such as home entertainment and control, public terminals, and car infotainment systems. As a so-called focus project, EMBASSI is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and addresses innovative methods of man–machine interaction, where “machine” explicitly refers to technical systems consisting of a variety of distributed, networked devices. EMBASSI aims at enhancing the interaction with these infrastructures by providing intelligent assistance, multimodal interaction, and anthropomorphic user interfaces within a unified framework. Technical development in EMBASSI is based on a user centered approach, with accompanying psychological and ergonomics research. A primary objective of the project is to establish an “EMBASSI layer” that extends recently developed networking standards like HAVi, UPnP, or Konnex towards user-centered, goal-based interaction by merging experiences from knowledge based AI systems with those coming from device oriented command and control architectures. This layer will enable the unification of interaction paradigms and will assist the user by enabling “natural” or “intuitive” commands instead of forcing the user to think in terms of device functions.