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July 24, 2012
Prof. Yingying Chen's group has a paper selected as the Spotlight Paper for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing - Paper Information:
"Sensing Driver Phone Use with Acoustic Ranging Through Car Speakers"
Jie Yang, Simon Sidhom, Gayathri Chandrasekaran, Tam Vu, Hongbo Liu, Nicolae Cecan, Yingying Chen, Marco Gruteser, & Richard P. Martin
Abstract
This work addresses the fundamental problem of distinguishing between a driver and passenger using a mobile phone, which is the critical input to enable numerous safety and interface enhancements. Our detection system leverages the existing car stereo infrastructure, in particular, the speakers and Bluetooth network. Our acoustic approach has the phone send a series of customized high frequency beeps via the car stereo. The beeps are spaced in time across the left, right, and if available, front and rear speakers. After sampling the beeps, we use a sequential change-point detection scheme to time their arrival, and then use a differential approach to estimate the phone’s distance from the car’s center. From these differences a passenger or driver classiï¬cation can be made. To validate our approach, we experimented with two kinds of phones and in two different cars. We found that our customized beeps were imperceptible to most users, yet still playable and recordable in both cars. Our customized beeps were also robust to background sounds such as music and wind, and we found the signal processing did not require excessive computational resources. In spite of the cars’ heavy multi-path environment, our approach had a classiï¬cation accuracy of over 90%, and around 95% with some calibrations. We also found we have a low false positive rate, on the order of a few percent.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) is a scholarly archival journal published monthly that focuses on the key technical issues related to Mobile Computing. It is the intent of TMC to publish mature works of research, typically those that have appeared in part in conferences. Furthermore, it is the intent of TMC to focus on issues at the link-layer and above in wireless communications, and to focus only on topics explicitly or plausibly related to mobile systems.
