Detection and classification of passenger seat occupancy using stereovision

Vision systems offer new opportunities for the improvement of vehicle safety. The detection and classification of passenger seat occupancy open up new ways to control the airbag firing. We present a stereo system designed for the observation of the cockpit scene in order to provide information about the passenger presence and location within the vehicle cockpit; from the stereo data, a cockpit occupancy map is generated. Several typical configurations of the passenger seat must be recognized (empty seat, adult presence, baby seat, ...). During an offline learning step, several cockpit images are recorded for each of these situations; for each one discriminant attributes are extracted. Then, the seat situation is recognized using a case-based classification method.