Faber, Petko IMAGE-BASED PASSENGER DETECTION AND LOCALIZATION INSIDE VEHICLES

In our paper we describe the ongoing research to develop an intelligent airbag system. Using image sequences acquired from a stereo camera, we detect the form and the position of the driver and passenger seat. And, if a seat is classified as occupied, we try to estimate the geometry and position of the human’s head as the most distinguishing feature of the body, if it is possible. The developed software system consists of five steps: the correction of distortions followed by an epipolar rectification of the stereo images, the feature extraction, the feature-based matching, the seat occupation detection and verification, and the approximation of the human’s head. The emphasis in this paper is on the used model to approximate the human’s head by an ellipsoid. The base of a subset of the estimated features as well as a certain assignment of the features to a human’s head. The used model bases on the least square method with a condition, which supports the approximation of an ellipsoid. To determine, if an obtained approximation is valid the result is compared with the standard dimensions of a human’s head. On tests on numerous image sequences recorded inside different vehicles the feasibility of the system is shown. The information about the seat occupation and the location of the detected passengers inside the vehicle can be used to control an intelligent airbag deployment. Figure 1: Possible scenarios seen by a camera inside a vehicle, which are of special interest for an intelligent airbag deployment.

A General Approach to Relaxation

. An interest topic in image processing and image interpretation is the development of methods to incorporate additional a-priori information into the unambiguous interpretation of objects. It is attractive because processes are needed which reduce ambiguity and noise, and finally select the most credible mappings of the objects to the set of interpreations. This paper presents a general approach to descibe and design relaxation processes. The approach is suitable for deterministic processes as well as stochastic processes. The developed approach is based on a definition of the relaxation process as a technique with three steps: the initialization, the updating, and the evaluation. Thereby, investigations of the updating step are in foreground. It is shown that a relaxation operator, which is essential for the relaxation process, can be defined at least by two characteristic functions, the compatibility function and the support function. The described approach is illustrated by an exam..