Video occupant detection and classification
AssigneeSandia Corporation
InventorJohn C. Krumm
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A system for determining when it is not safe to arm a vehicle airbag by storing representations of known situations as observed by a camera at a passenger seat; and comparing a representation of a camera output of the current situation to the stored representations to determine the known situation most closely represented by the current situation. In the preferred embodiment, the stored representations include the presence or absence of a person or infant seat in the front passenger seat of an automobile.
Claims19
A system for distinguishing situations at a specified location comprising:
- camera means comprising
- a lens having a field of view encompassing the specified location, and
- output means for providing an output corresponding to an image observed by said lens;
- storage means for storing a vector representation of a plurality of images of a known situation as observed by a camera at the specified location, said vector representation including eigenvectors associated with each image;
- signal processing means for comparing a vector representation of the camera output to the stored representations to determine the stored representation with the highest correlation to the output signal;
- means for comparing the highest correlation to a predetermined value;
- and
- indicator means for indicating the known situation of the stored signal when the highest correlation exceeds the predetermined value.
A system for distinguishing situations at a specified location comprising:
- a camera comprising
- a pair of lenses for providing binocular stereo images of the specified location, and
- output means for providing an output corresponding to an image observed by said lens;
- storage means for storing a vector representation of a known situation at the specified location as observed by said camera means, and
- signal processing means for comparing a vector representation of the camera output to the stored representations to determine the stored representation with the highest correlation to the output signal, wherein each vector represents a function of the range of the image from said camera;
- means for comparing the highest correlation to a predetermined value;
- and
- indicator means for indicating the known situation of the stored signal when the highest correlation exceeds the predetermined value.
An efficient system for determining if an image corresponds to a predetermined situation having many variations, comprising:
- means for generating a vector v.sub.i representing said first image;
- means for correlating v.sub.i with a function of n' of n vectors p.sub.i representing possible variations of the situation, wherein n'<<n, and correlation which exceeds a predetermined value provides an indication that the image corresponds to the situation.
An efficient method for determining if an image corresponds to a predetermined situation having many variations, comprising:
- capturing an image;
- generating a vector v.sub.i representing said image;
- correlating v.sub.i with a function of n' of n vectors p.sub.i representing possible variations of a situation, wherein n'<<n, and correlation which exceeds a predetermined value provides an indication that the image corresponds to the situation.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.