Masatoshi Tohno

Preceding Vehicle Detection Using Stereo Images and Non-scanning Millimeter-Wave Radar

We developed a system that detects the vehicle driving immediately ahead of ones own car in the same lane and measures the distance to and relative speed of that vehicle to prevent accidents such as rear-end collisions. The system is the first in the industry to use non-scanning millimeter-wave radar combined with a sturdy stereo image sensor, which keeps cost low. It can operate stably in adverse weather conditions such as rain, which could not easily be done with previous sensors. The systems vehicle detection performance was tested, and the system can correctly detect vehicles driving 3 to 50 m ahead in the same lane with higher than 99% accuracy in clear weather. Detection performance in rainy weather, where water drops and splashes notably degraded visibility, was higher than 90%.

Evaluation of the total dose and single event upset effects on JPEG/DPCM LSI device and 16Mb-DRAM for space application

Recently many satellites have missions to transmit image data to the ground through realtime downlink. Since the satellites are linked to the ground stations through limited bandwidth, the image data must be compressed to meet mission requirements. Meanwhile, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and other public establishments have begun to appropriate commercially available devices to their projects to reduce development costs and to apply the latest technologies. Under these circumstances, we evaluated the radiation tolerance characteristics of a large scale integrated (LSI) device having both the JPEG (lossy) and DPCM (lossless) functions and a large scale integrated dynamic random access memory (16 Mb-DRAM) necessary to carry out the compression. To gather the radiation tolerance characteristics, we carried out the single event upset tolerance test and total dose tolerance test for JPEG/DPCM LSI and 16 Mb-DRAM. In this paper, using the data gathered from the radiation tests, we describe the feasibility of applying JPEG/DPCM LSI and 16 Mb-DRAM to satellites.