Toward "Light‐to‐Light" Protection of Automotive Camera Monitor Systems

Benjamin Axmann, Frank Langner, Chihao Xu, Karlheinz Blankenbach, Mirko Conrad, Jan Bauer
2021 Information display  
THE DEMAND FOR SAFETY-RELEVANT REQUIREMENTS IN automotive displays is on the rise. Camera monitoring systems (CMS), such as surround-view monitoring or mirror-replacement systems, are being designed to meet these new standards. Because future car designs trend toward a reduced view outside, the driver will need to rely more on video data screens inside the car. Over the past two years, the Video Safety research group at Mercedes-Benz, in cooperation with specialized universities and companies,
more » ... as focused on display technology and supervision (in terms of performance monitoring and fault detection) to provide a new solution: light-to-light (L2L) supervision for CMS safeguarding. To show how this group is meeting these future L2L needs, here we detail new methods that demonstrate enhanced safety in CMS systems. We then explore the research group's focus on two use cases (in cars and remote view video presentation on displays) to specify the general requirements for all automotive-relevant CMS systems. Finally, we describe our prototype effort and results. Safety Framework As an overview, we first provide a diagram of the work being done and how it has shaped the safety framework's development. Fig. 1 shows how the two use cases 1 were superimposed onto one vehicle, such that camera data and other relevant information can be displayed on an in-vehicle display and a remote operator's workstation. To design in-vehicle CMS and remote operator systems as safely as possible, we used prototypes to investigate and demonstrate new approaches to safeguard them. Current automotive displays have only interface and tell-tale supervision (besides supply voltage) for the instrument cluster. With our new mechanisms in place, we can detect failures such as delays, wrong text messages, and missing objects. In addition, we are able to detect optical performance issues with the display-including incorrect luminance and contrast-that are not recognizable by a human observer. Ensuring functional safety, such as mitigating risks resulting from failures of electric/electronic (E/E) systems, is a key issue in developing road vehicles. Engineering for functional safety is guided by the international standard for functional safety of electrical and electronic systems that are installed in serial production road vehicles (ISO 26262). The risk level originating from a system is classified using automotive safety integrity levels (ASIL). 2 To safeguard an automotive CMS, the actual system architecture, which can be modeled as a set of input (I), modifier (M), output (O), and video data transmission (T) components (Fig. 2, left) , must be extended by additional components to detect or mitigate faults and control failures. Such ASIL Prepared Video Safety System VEHICLE DISPLAYS
doi:10.1002/msid.1215 fatcat:j7oqmqqbabbdddsdnginvksbtq