Vision-based fusion system for smart airbag applications

We describe a vision system for intelligent automotive airbag systems which can adapt airbag deployment according to the nature and position of the occupant, thereby reducing the risks for occupants who are in infant seats in the front passenger seat and all occupants who are too close to the airbag. Our system utilizes a stereo camera to extract multiple feature sets from the same video stream. A unique feature of our system is the fusion module which is trained to optimally combine the results of multiple classifiers to decide when to enable airbag deployment. We have successfully demonstrated this system operating in a test vehicle at real-time rates (20 updates/sec) with high accuracies (>98%) for a large variety of situations and lighting conditions.