Objective: Microwave breast imaging has seen significant academic and commercial development in recent years, with four new operational microwave imaging systems used with patients since 2016. In this work, a comprehensive review of these recent clinical advances is presented, comparing patient populations and study outcomes. For the first time, the design of operational microwave imaging systems are compared in detail. Methods: Firstly, the current understanding of dielectric properties of human breast tissues is reviewed; considering evidence from operational microwave imaging systems and from dielectric properties measurement studies. Secondly, design features of operational microwave imaging systems are discussed in terms of advantages and disadvantages during clinical operation. Results: Reported results from patient imaging trials are compared, contrasting the principal results from each trial. Additionally, clinical experience from each trial is highlighted, identifying desirable system design features for clinical use. Conclusions: Increasingly, evidence from patient imaging studies indicate that a contrast in dielectric properties between healthy and cancerous breast tissues exists. However, despite the significant and encouraging results from patient trials, variation still exists in microwave imaging system design. Significance: This work seeks to define the current state-of-the-art in microwave breast imaging, and identify suitable design characteristics for ease of clinical use.
21 May 2014 in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Automotive electronics is a rapidly expanding area with an increasing number of safety, driver assistance, and infotainment devices becoming standard in new vehicles. Current vehicles generally employ a number of different networking protocols to integrate these systems into the vehicle. The introduction of large numbers of sensors to provide driver assistance applications and the associated high-bandwidth requirements of these sensors have accelerated the demand for faster and more flexible network communication technologies within the vehicle. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of current research on advanced intra-vehicle networks and identifies outstanding research questions for the future.
1 February 2017 in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture
Automated detection of vehicles in front is an integral component of many advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), such as collision mitigation, automatic cruise control (ACC), and automatic headlamp dimming. We present a novel image processing system to detect and track vehicle rear-lamp pairs in forward-facing color video. A standard low-cost camera with a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and Bayer red-green-blue (RGB) color filter is used and could be utilized for full-color image display or other color image processing applications. The appearance of rear lamps in video and imagery can dramatically change, depending on camera hardware; therefore, we suggest a camera-configuration process that optimizes the appearance of rear lamps for segmentation. Rear-facing lamps are segmented from low-exposure forward-facing color video using a red-color threshold. Unlike previous work in the area, which uses subjective color threshold boundaries, our color threshold is directly derived from automotive regulations and adapted for real-world conditions in the hue-saturation-value (HSV) color space. Lamps are paired using color cross-correlation symmetry analysis and tracked using Kalman filtering. A tracking-based detection stage is introduced to improve robustness and to deal with distortions caused by other light sources and perspective distortion, which are common in automotive environments. Results that demonstrate the system's high detection rates, operating distance, and robustness to different lighting conditions and road environments are presented.
1 April 2024 in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Autonomous vehicles and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have started to become a reality in recent years. However, shortcomings of these early intelligent vehicles demonstrate a need to increase an intelligent vehicle’s perceptual bubble beyond the vehicle’s onboard sensors. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications is a technology intended to enable intelligent vehicles to increase their perceptive range via communication with the outside world i.e. other vehicles, road users, and infrastructure. One of the critical layers of V2X communications is that of the underlying wireless access. There remains an open debate on which technology (or technologies) will ultimately be adopted as the de facto wireless access technology for V2X communications. Presently, a myriad of unconnected threads of work are being undertaken to this end, resulting in an unclear picture of the current state of wireless access for V2X communications. In this tutorial review, we collate current research on wireless access for V2X communications to showcase recent developments and the challenges facing candidate technologies. To allow the reader to engage with the debate, we present an overview of the field of V2X communications, its history, and standardisation. Following this, we provide an overview of the key candidate wireless access technologies that may enable V2X communications. Through this work, we aim to provide a comprehensive first step into the discipline of wireless access for V2X communications.