Vehicle occupancy monitoring with a monocular optical range sensor system

This paper describes a system for in-vehicle monitoring of occupant positions, which has implications for safe deployment of airbags. A camera is mounted in the vehicle roof and features a three-dimensional-optical time-of-flight sensor, with active modulated infrared illumination. The sensor measures the phase shift between the detected light beam reflected by an object and the transmitted signal. Pre-processing filters the signal before classification of occupant is made. Head detection and tracking is performed by means of a data association filter and a set of parallel running linear Kalman filters. For the covering abstract see ITRD E127621.