The increasing use of electronic components in today&rsquo / s automobiles demands more powerful in-vehicle network communication protocols. FlexRay protocol, which is expected to be the de-facto standard in the near future, is a deterministic, fault tolerant and fast protocol designed for in vehicle communication. For proper operation of a FlexRay network the communication schedule needs to be computed and the nodes need to be configured before startup. Current software tools that are geared towards FlexRay only deal with the configuration process. The schedule needs to be computed by a network designer manually and it is necessary to input the designed schedule and the configurable parameters by hand. This thesis improves upon a previous scheduling software to automatically compute the network schedule, and then generate a universally acceptable FIBEX file that can be imported to available software tools to produce the necessary FlexRay node configuration files.

The similarity between two shapes is typically calculated by measuring how well the properties and the spatial organization of the primitives forming the shapes agree. But, when this calculations are done independent from the context, i.e. the whole set of shapes in the experiments, a priori significance to the primitives is assigned, which may cause problematic similarity measures. A possible way of using context information in similarity measure between shape A and shape B is using the category information of shape B in calculations. In this study, shapes are represented as depth-1 shape trees and the dissimilarity between two shapes is computed by using an approximate tree matching algorithm. The category information is created as the union of shape trees that are in the same category and this information guides the matching process between a query shape and a shape whose category is known.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are widely used in prototyping digital circuits. However commercial FPGAs are not very suitable for asynchronous design. Both the architecture of the FPGAs and the synthesis tools are mostly tailored to synchronous design. Therefore potential advantages of the asynchronous circuits could not be observed when they are implemented on commercial FPGAs. This is shown by designing an asynchronous arithmetic logic unit (ALU), implemented in the style of micropipelines, on the Xilinx Virtex XCV300 FPGA family. The hazard characteristics of the target FPGA have been analyzed and a methodology for selftimed asynchronous circuits has been proposed. The design methodology proposes first designing a hazard-free cell set, and then using relationally placed macros (RPMs) to keep the hazard-free behavior, and incremental design technique to combine modules in upper levels without disturbing their timing characteristics. The performance of the asynchronous ALU has been evaluated in terms of the logic slices occupied in the FPGA and data latencies, and a comparison is made with a synchronous ALU designed on the same FPGA.

This thesis presents a framework design and implementation that enables run-time selection of different remote call mechanisms. In order to implement an extendable and modular system with run-time upgrading facility, a plug-in framework design is used. Since such a design requires enhanced usage of run-time facilities of the programming language that is used to implement the framework, in this study Java is selected because of its reflection and dynamic class loading facilities. A sample usage of this framework is enabling an application to distribute its tasks over a network using a suitable distributed object technology (DOT). In this work, CORBA, RMI and Java Sockets are the sample DOT plug-ins. A series of performance evaluations of these DOTs are presented to establish a baseline for choosing a suitable DOT for the application domain that uses this framework.

Data Distribution Service (DDS) specification defines an API for Data-Centric Publish-Subscribe (DCPS) model to achieve efficient data distribution in distributed computing environments. Lack of definition of interoperability architecture in DDS specification obstructs data distribution between different and heterogeneous DDS implementations. In this thesis, DDS is implemented as a CORBA service to achieve interoperability and a QoS policy is proposed for faster data distribution with CORBA features.

In this thesis, video frames acquired by a camera in a moving car are processed for detection of candidates of triangular, rectangular and circular traffic/road signs based on mainly shape information by performing contour analysis. Color information is utilized as an auxiliary method to improve detection. Then recognition based on template matching is realized on detected traffic/road sign candidates. Detection and recognition results of traffic/road signs in video frames taken in different time intervals of day for these methods are compared. After implementation, results show that the video scene taken in a sunny day in the afternoon gives better results than others. Binary threshold plays a great role in detection with respect to Canny edge detector especially for triangular and rectangular traffic signs. Higher number of binary threshold levels improves detection in general. In addition, the recognition rate for triangular and rectangular traffic/road signs is higher than that of circular sings in general by the methods used in this study.

Missile Detection System (MDS) is one of the main components of a self-protection system developed against the threat of guided missiles for airborne platforms. The requirements such as time critical operation and high accuracy in classification performance make the &lsquo / Pattern Recognition&rsquo / problem of an MDS a hard task. Problem can be defined in two main parts such as &lsquo / Feature Set Evaluation&rsquo / (FSE) and &lsquo / Classifier&rsquo / designs. The main goal of feature set evaluation is to employ a dimensionality reduction process for the input data set, while not disturbing the classification performance in the result. In this thesis study, FSE approaches are investigated for the pattern recognition problem of a generic MDS. First, synthetic data generation is carried out in software environment by employing generic models and assumptions in order to reflect the nature of a realistic problem environment. Then, data sets are evaluated in order to draw a baseline for further feature set evaluation approaches. Further, a theoretical background including the concepts of Class Separability, Feature Selection and Feature Extraction is given. Several widely used methods are assessed in terms of convenience for the problem by giving necessary justifications depending on the data set characteristics. Upon this background, software implementations are performed regarding several feature set evaluation techniques. Simulations are carried out in order to process dimensionality reduction. For the evaluation of the resulting data sets in terms of classification performance, software implementation of a classifier is realized. Resulting classification performances of the applied approaches are compared and evaluated.

License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems are frequently utilized in various access controls and security applications. In this thesis, an experimental constraint based real-time License Plate Recognition system is designed, and implemented in Java platform. Many of the available constraint based methods worked under strict restrictions such as plate color, fixed illumination and designated routes, whereas, only the license plate geometry and format constraints are used in this developed system. These constraints are built on top of the current Turkish license plate regulations. The plate localization algorithm is based on vertical edge features where constraints are used to filter out non-text regions. Vertical and horizontal projections are used for character segmentation and Multi Layered Perceptron (MLP) based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module has been implemented for character identification. The extracted license plate characters are validated against possible license plate formats during the recognition process. The system is tested both with Turkish and foreign license plate images including various plate orientation, image quality and size. An accuracy of 92% is achieved for license plate localization and %88 for character segmentation and recognition.

In this thesis, an 8-bit microcontroller, PIC 16F871, has been implemented using SystemC with classical hardware design methods. Analog modules of the microcontroller have been modeled behaviorally with SystemC-AMS which is the analog and mixed signal extensions for the SystemC. SystemC-AMS provides the capability to model non-digital modules and synchronization with the SystemC kernel. In this manner, electronic systems that have both digital and analog components can be described and simulated very effectively. The PIC 16F871 is a well known and very common microcontroller. Its architecture, peripheral modules and analog components makes this microcontroller pretty good model for a System on Chip (SoC) concept. Designed microcontroller&rsquo / s peripheral modules, instruction set and addressing modes have been verified utilizing the test codes. Besides, designed microcontroller has been tested with 16-bit CRC code. Moreover, a synchronous demodulator system that involves designed microcontroller and additional analog units has been constructed and simulated. Finally, SystemC to hardware flow has been demonstrated with implementation of arithmetic logic unit of the 16F871 into FPGA based hardware.

Nowadays, 3D modelling of objects from multiple images is a topic that has gained great recognition and is widely used in various fields. Recently, lots of progress has been made in identification of people using 3D face models, which are usually reconstructed from multiple face images. In this thesis, a system including stereo cameras and structured light is built for the purpose of 3D modelling. The system outputs are 3D shapes of the face and also the texture information registered to this shape. Although the system in this thesis is developed for face reconstruction, it is not specific to faces. Using the same methodology proposed in this study 3D reconstruction of any object can be achieved.