An In-Vehicle Occupant Detection Technique Based on a 60 GHz FMCW MIMO Radar

A novel in-vehicle occupant detection technique with a 60 GHz frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is presented. The 2D imaging is obtained by digital beamforming (DBF) based on the virtual array of the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) architecture. A logistic regression presence-absence detection method is proposed to provide information about the number of the passengers as well as their location. The feature matrix is extracted from the 2D imaging and multiplied by the weight vector to obtain the occupants' presence-absence probability. A series of experiments are carried out in real in-vehicle environments to validate the proposed technique. The experimental results show that the proposed technique can well detect the number and location of the occupants.