Vehicle occupant monitoring system and method

A method for monitoring occupants of a vehicle comprising:

• obtaining successive images of an interior cabin of the vehicle from an occupant facing camera;
• identifying one or more respective body bounding boxes for a body region for one or more occupants of said vehicle within an obtained image;
• determining confidence levels of each of the one or more respective body bounding boxes;
• select the one or more respective body bounding boxes with the confidence levels exceeding a predetermined confidence level as body regions;
• identifying within at least one of said body regions, based on the confidence levels, a plurality of skeletal points including one or more points on an arm of a body;
• identifying one or more face regions within said obtained image;
• identifying one or more hand regions within said obtained image;
• determining a hand region to be either a left or a right hand of an occupant in accordance with its spatial relationship with identified skeletal points of said body region of said occupant;
• determining a face region to be a face region of an occupant in accordance with its spatial relationship with said body region of said occupant;
• analysing a spatial relationship of a determined left or right hand region and a determined face region to provisionally determine a state of said occupant;
• providing at least said determined left or right hand region for said occupant to a classifier to provide an activity classification for said occupant, wherein said activity classification comprises a first classification for movements of the determined left or right hand regions with an object and a second classification for the movement of the determined left or right hand regions with the object not visible to the occupant facing camera;
• combining said provisional state of said occupant and said activity classification to provide a final state for said occupant;
• and
• automatically controlling a speed of the vehicle based on the final state for said occupant.