Ford Motor Company

About: Ford Motor Company is a company organization based out in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Internal combustion engine & Signal. The organization has 36123 authors who have published 51450 publications receiving 855200 citations. The organization is also known as: Ford Motor & Ford Motor Corporation.

On-road vehicle detection using evolutionary Gabor filter optimization

Abstract: Robust and reliable vehicle detection from images acquired by a moving vehicle is an important problem with numerous applications including driver assistance systems and self-guided vehicles. Our focus in this paper is on improving the performance of on-road vehicle detection by employing a set of Gabor filters specifically optimized for the task of vehicle detection. This is essentially a kind of feature selection, a critical issue when designing any pattern classification system. Specifically, we propose a systematic and general evolutionary Gabor filter optimization (EGFO) approach for optimizing the parameters of a set of Gabor filters in the context of vehicle detection. The objective is to build a set of filters that are capable of responding stronger to features present in vehicles than to nonvehicles, therefore improving class discrimination. The EGFO approach unifies filter design with filter selection by integrating genetic algorithms (GAs) with an incremental clustering approach. Filter design is performed using GAs, a global optimization approach that encodes the Gabor filter parameters in a chromosome and uses genetic operators to optimize them. Filter selection is performed by grouping filters having similar characteristics in the parameter space using an incremental clustering approach. This step eliminates redundant filters, yielding a more compact optimized set of filters. The resulting filters have been evaluated using an application-oriented fitness criterion based on support vector machines. We have tested the proposed framework on real data collected in Dearborn, MI, in summer and fall 2001, using Ford's proprietary low-light camera.

Magnetorheological elastomers in tunable vibration absorbers

Abstract: Filling an elastomeric material with magnetizable particles leads to mechanical properties -shear moduli, tensile moduli, and magnetostriction coefficients - that are reversibly and rapidly controllable by an applied magnetic field. The origin of the field dependence of these properties is the existence of field-induced dipole magnetic forces between the particles. These 'smart' composites, which are sometimes termed magnetorheological (MR) elastomers, have been explored for use in a number of components, including automotive suspension bushings. In these and other applications, the tunability of the stiffness can enhance the compliance-control or vibration-transfer performance of the complex mechanical systems in which they are used. In the present study, we have constructed a simple one-degree-of-freedom mass-spring system - an adaptive tuned vibration absorber - that utilizes MR elastomers as variable-spring-rate elements. This device was used not only to explore the performance of such tunable components, but also to extend measurements of the shear moduli of these materials to higher frequencies than has previously been reported. We find that the field-induced increase in moduli of these materials is effective to mechanical frequencies well above 1 kHz, and that the moduli are consistent with the behavior expected for filled elastomers.© (2001) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.