Vehicle Seat Occupancy Detection and Classification Using Capacitive Sensing

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Improving passenger safety inside vehicle cabins requires continuously monitoring vehicle seat occupancy statuses. Monitoring a vehicle seat’s occupancy status includes detecting if the seat is occupied and classifying the seat’s occupancy type. This paper introduces an innovative non-intrusive technique that employs capacitive sensing and an occupancy classifier to monitor a vehicle seat’s occupancy status. Capacitive sensing is facilitated by a meticulously constructed capacitance-sensing mat that easily integrates with any vehicle seat. When a passenger or an inanimate object occupies a vehicle seat equipped with the mat, they will induce variations in the mat’s internal capacitances. The variations are, in turn, represented pictorially as grayscale capacitance-sensing images (<i>CSI</i>), which yield the feature vectors the classifier requires to classify the seat’s occupancy type. This paper details the working of the proposed technique in monitoring vehicle seat occupancy statuses non-intrusively and presents experimental results to validate the technique’s effectiveness in meeting performance expectations.</div></div>