Journal of Automotive Software Engineering

As of today, automotive video data transmission and processing systems are already being developed according to ISO 26262, but safety mechanisms and safety architectures for such systems are individually derived on a case-by-case basis. This approach, i.e., reinventing the wheel, over and over again, is neither effective nor well suited for future use cases with system variants and varying system components from multiple suppliers. Further, existing safety mechanisms for video data transmission and processing systems fall short of providing a full “light-to-light” monitoring. To reduce this gap, this paper proposes a generic safety architecture and a method to derive suitable safety mechanisms for automotive video data transmission and processing systems. In addition, enhanced safety mechanisms to detect and indicate faults in such systems are outlined. These contributions to improve the functional safety of automotive video data transmission and processing systems have been devised in a joint research project involving an automotive OEM and multiple industrial and academic partners.