Measurement of Micro Vibration of Car by Piezoelectric Ceramics

—Detection of Bio-Informations in the Car and Application for Security—

Abstract

Recently, there are various accidents and crimes related to the car. In some cases, the accidents and the crimes can be prevented if it is possible to detect a human who is in the car. For example, we can prevent a baby who is left in a car under the hot weather from dehydration or death occurred by heat inside disease. In another case, it is estimated that the United States currently has as many as 12 million illegal immigrants. In order to prevent further influx of illegal immigrants, the police are physically searching incoming vehicles at national boundaries aiming at finding those who are hiding inside. However, the physical inspections require much manpower cost and time. An inspection method to see inside the vehicles through X-ray images has also been used for this end. But the cost and the installation places are the problems of the large-scale X-ray system. Proposed in this paper is a piezoelectric ceramic system to handily measure the micro vibrations of motor vehicles. And applying the algorithm of Support Vector Machine (SVM), the existence of human body inside vehicles can be detected. The experiment was carried out using four types of vehicles: a mini car; an auto mobile; a van; and a truck weighing 1.5 tons. As the results, the correct determination ratio was 91.2% for the experiment with the piezoelectric ceramic under the front wheels and 97.0% under the rear wheels, when the vehicle used for the examination had also been used together with other three types of vehicles to obtain SVM training data. When the vehicle used for the examination had not been used together with the other three to obtain SVM training data, on the other hand, the correct determination ratio was 93.7% for the experiment with the piezoelectric ceramic under the front wheels and 95.7% under the rear wheels.