Cashless Parking: Adhesive Microchip On Car Windshield Pays Meter, No Need To Fumble For Change

Vacant parking spaces in town are thin on the ground. Finding one is just as tiresome as making sure you have the right change for the parking machine. An adhesive microchip on the windshield will make things much easier by unlocking the door to cashless parking. 

The car moves slowly towards the car park exit, the barriers open automatically – without the driver having to wind down the window and insert a ticket. This is thanks to a small RFID chip on the inside of the windshield. Devices on the ceiling above the car park entrance and exit read the adhesive foil transponder measuring just 1.5 x 10 centimeters and register the parking time. 

The fees are charged by a direct debit from an online account. VIATAG is the name of the RFID system which the research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML in Dortmund have developed for Munich-based company motionID technologies. 

VIATAG RFID System

Credit: Fraunhofer Institute

“Waiting at the parking machine, searching for change, losing your ticket – all that is a thing of the past. The car driver saves time and enjoys a more convenient service,” states project manager Arnd Ciprina from the IML, listing the advantages of the system. And the car-park operators benefit too. The cost of recording and billing the parking time is reduced, but they can continue to use their existing systems in parallel to the new solution.

VIATAG is a passive RFID solution, which means that the microchip does not need a battery. It draws its energy from the electromagnetic field of the reader device. The radio data are transmitted in the ultra-high frequency (UHF) range and the distance between the transponder and reader can be up to eight meters. Each chip has its own twelve-digit code, enabling every car to be identified when passing through the entrance and exit. The fees are charged in the background online. 

A database application running on a central server controls the payment transactions. The customer can maintain an overview of the amounts debited at all times on a web application, like online banking. A list of the parking time and charges can be printed out as a partial or complete account. The total amount owed is paid at the end of the month by direct debit.

Data security is not a problem either. Ciprina: “No personal data is stored on the chip. The twelve-digit code is encrypted so that third parties cannot connect the identification number with a user.” Nor is it worth stealing the foil transponder. If the sticker is removed from the windshield it self-destructs and cannot be used again.

VIATAG successfully passed the initial practical tests, which lasted several weeks. The system has already been installed in public car parks in Essen, Duisburg and Munich. The research scientists at the IML and motionID technologies now hope that a lot more car-park operators will support the solution. Other sectors should also find the contactless and cashless payment system interesting. Automatic billing would be suitable for highway service plazas, gas stations, drive-in cinemas and eateries, car washes and car hire firms, adds Ciprina.

Contact and sources:
Arnd Ciprina
Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics

Facial Recognition For Apes Will Help Save Species In The Wild

With the aim of better protecting endangered species, game wardens are studying the behavior of surviving great apes in the wild. This is often painstaking work because it is difficult to distinguish between different individuals. A new software system will make things easier by analyzing the animals’ faces for individual identification.

The new software system searches through photos and video sequences, analyzes the apes’ faces and links them to individuals. 

Credit: © Dr. Tobias Deschner – MPI EVA (2009), Taï Nationalpark

The pictures from the video trap are highly encouraging. A strong young male gorilla appears several times – in a tree, moving through the forest, at a feeding place. This is a good sign for the park ranger. It indicates that the population in the protected zone is recovering. What he does not know, however, is whether it’s the same gorilla each time or various young adults.

Knowledge of how many individuals are living in a particular area is vital if these extinction-threatened species are to be more effectively protected. The park rangers therefore spare no effort to obtain reliable figures about the population. They search the forests for feeding and gathering places, read tracks and try to match them to specific individuals. In addition, they spend hours analyzing pictures from video and photo traps – a painstaking and time-consuming job, which is also subjective and susceptible to error.

A new software system could soon make things easier for the park rangers by searching through the photos and videos for sequences in which the animals appear and assigning the images to individual gorillas. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Integrated Circuits IIS and Digital Media Technology IDMT as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are jointly developing the system in the SAISBECO project.

“The pictures are first filtered to find the ones on which the primates’ faces can be seen,” explains Alexander Loos from the IDMT in Ilmenau. This task is handled by a detection software program developed by research scientists at the IIS in Erlangen which detects faces on individual pictures as well as on video streams in real time. Loos and his colleagues are currently developing a module that will assign the faces to specific individuals. “Our software analyzes the primates’ faces using special algorithms,” states Loos. At the moment these face-recognition algorithms analyze the entire face. In a data pool of 24 chimpanzees at Leipzig Zoo the Max Planck research scientists achieved a recognition rate of 83 percent.

This good hit accuracy is due to the high quality of the photos. “The algorithms are strongly affected by external influences,” explains Loos. “In poor light or if the faces are partially occluded the recognition rates quickly drop to below 60 percent.” Because it is much more difficult to get good pictures in the wild, the Ilmenau-based research scientists intend to add further algorithms which will not analyze the entire face but specific biometric features – such as the eyes, nose and mouth.

The new software system also analyzes audio signals and assigns them to various noises made by the apes, for example chest drumming and threatening grunts like pant-hoots. This provides not only a basis for studying their social behavior but also enables specific individuals to be quickly identified, as the research scientists no longer have to listen to all of the recorded material. As a next step, the scientists intend to expand their data sets, because the software system learns as it performs the analysis, and the recognition rate improves as the number of pictures per individual in the data pool increases.

A further module is also to be added to the system. This will automatically recognize what activity the ape is engaged in and provide valuable information in particular for studying their social behavior

Contacts and sources:
Alexander Loos
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology

Nemesis Star A Myth: Researchers Refute Claim Earth Is Periodically Hit By Asteroids Or Comets

Max Planck researchers refute the claim that Earth is periodically hit by asteroids or comets. Nemesis is a hypothetical hard-to-detect red dwarf star, white dwarf star or brown dwarf, orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 50,000 to 100,000 AU (about 0.8-1.5 light-years), somewhat beyond the Oort cloud. Nemesis is theorized to disturb the Oort cloud and periodically cast dangerous comets towards the inner solar system and Earth.

Danger looms from out of space: asteroids and comets are a threat to our planet. The history of Earth has always been punctuated by cosmic catastrophes. Several studies have claimed to have found periodic variations, with the probability of giant impacts increasing and decreasing in a regular pattern.

Artist's concept of Nemesis Star, a red dwarf

Image: Wikipedia

This Nemesis star was originally postulated to exist as part of a hypothesis to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seem to occur once every 26 million years or so. In addition, observations by astronomers of the sharp edges of Oort clouds, similar to that of the Solar System, around various binary (double) star systems, in contrast to the diffuse edges of the Oort clouds around single-star systems, has prompted some scientists to postulate that a dwarf star may be co-orbiting the Sun. 

Counter-theories also exist that other forces (like the angular effect of the galactic gravity plane) may be the cause of the sharp-edged Oort cloud pattern around the Sun. To date the issue remains unsettled in the scientific community.

Now a new analysis by Coryn Bailer-Jones from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) shows those simple periodic patterns to be statistical artifacts. His results indicate either that the Earth is as likely to suffer a major impact now as it was in the past, or that there has been a slight increase impact rate events over the past 250 million years

Barringer Crater, also known as Meteor Crater, in Arizona. This crater was formed around 50,000 years ago by the impact of a nickel-iron meteorite. Near the top of the image, the visitors center, complete with tour buses on the parking lot, provides a sense of scale.

© National Map Seamless Viewer/US Geological Service

Giant impacts by comets or asteroids have been linked to several mass extinction events on Earth, most famously to the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Nearly 200 identifiable craters on the Earth's surface, some of them hundreds of kilometers in diameter, bear witness to these catastrophic collisions.

Understanding the way impact rates might have varied over time is not just an academic question. It is an important ingredient when scientists estimate the risk Earth currently faces from catastrophic cosmic impacts.

Since the mid-1980s, a number of authors have claimed to have identified periodic variations in the impact rate. Using crater data, notably the age estimates for the different craters, they derive a regular pattern where, every so-and-so-many million years (values vary between 13 and 50 million years), an era with fewer impacts is followed by an era with increased impact activity, and so on.

Giant impacts by comets or asteroids have been linked to several mass extinction events on Earth, most famously to the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Nearly 200 identifiable craters on the Earth's surface, some of them hundreds of kilometers in diameter, bear witness to these catastrophic collisions.

Understanding the way impact rates might have varied over time is not just an academic question. It is an important ingredient when scientists estimate the risk Earth currently faces from catastrophic cosmic impacts.

Since the mid-1980s, a number of authors have claimed to have identified periodic variations in the impact rate. Using crater data, notably the age estimates for the different craters, they derive a regular pattern where, every so-and-so-many million years (values vary between 13 and 50 million years), an era with fewer impacts is followed by an era with increased impact activity, and so on.

The Nördlinger Ries, or Ries, was formed when a meteor hit the area 15 million years ago. The resulting crater, roughly 20 km in diameter, has since been filled in and eroded. In this natural-colour satellite image, it can just be made out as a circular structure, much less clearly defined than the Barringer Crater, which is significantly younger.

© Credit: NASA/J. Allen using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

One proposed mechanism for these variations is the periodic motion of our Solar System relative to the main plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. This could lead to differences in the way that the minute gravitational influence of nearby stars tugs on the objects in the Oort cloud, a giant repository of comets that forms a shell around the outer Solar System, nearly a light-year away from the Sun, leading to episodes in which more comets than usual leave the Oort cloud to make their way into the inner Solar System – and, potentially, towards a collision with the Earth.

A more spectacular proposal posits the existence of an as-yet undetected companion star to the Sun, dubbed “Nemesis”. Its highly elongated orbit, the reasoning goes, would periodically bring Nemesis closer to the Oort cloud, again triggering an increase in the number of comets setting course for Earth.

In 1984, paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski published a paper claiming that they had identified a statistical periodicity in extinction rates over the last 250 million years using various forms of time series analysis. They focused on the extinction intensity of fossil families of marine vertebrates, invertebrates, and protozoans, identifying 12 extinction events over the time period in question. The average time interval between extinction events was determined as 26 million years. At the time, two of the identified extinction events (Cretaceous-Tertiary and Late Eocene) could be shown to coincide with large impact events. Although Raup and Sepkoski could not identify the cause of their supposed periodicity, they suggested that there might be a non-terrestrial connection. The challenge to propose a mechanism was quickly addressed by several teams of astronomers.

Two teams of astronomers, Whitmire and Jackson, and Davis, Hut, and Muller, independently published similar hypotheses to explain Raup and Sepkoski's extinction periodicity in the same issue of the journal Nature. This hypothesis proposes that the Sun may have an as yet undetected companion star in a highly elliptical orbit that periodically disturbs comets in the Oort cloud, causing a large increase in the number of comets visiting the inner solar system with a consequential increase in impact events on Earth. This became known as the Nemesis (or, more colorfully, Death Star) hypothesis.

If it does exist, the exact nature of Nemesis is uncertain. Richard A. Muller suggests that the most likely object is a red dwarf with magnitude between 7 and 12,while Daniel P. Whitmire and Albert A. Jackson argue for a brown dwarf. If a red dwarf, it would undoubtedly already exist in star catalogs, but its true nature would only be detectable by measuring its parallax; due to orbiting the Sun it would have a very low proper motion and would escape detection by proper motion surveys that have found stars like the 9th magnitude Barnard's star.

The last major extinction event was about 5 million years ago, so Muller posits that Nemesis is likely 1.0 to 1.5 light-years (63,000–95,000 AU) away at present, and even has ideas of what area of the sky it might be in (supported by Yarris, 1987), near Hydra, based on a hypothetical orbit derived from original apogees of a number of atypical long-period comets that describe an orbital arc meeting the specifications of Muller's hypothesis.

If Nemesis exists, then it may be detected by the planned Pan-STARRS or LSST astronomical surveys.

In particular, if Nemesis is a red dwarf star or a brown dwarf, then the WISE mission (an infrared sky survey that covered most of our solar neighborhood in movement-verifying parallax measurements) is expected to be able to find it, if it exists.[9] Preliminary results of the WISE survey were released on 14 April 2011. The final release of analyzed results is scheduled to be released in March 2012.

Contacts and sources:
Dr. Coryn Bailer-Jones
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

Max Planck Institute




Citation: C. A. L. Bailer-Jones Bayesian time series analysis of terrestrial impact cratering

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society