In various examples, systems and methods are disclosed that accurately identify driver and passenger in-cabin activities that may indicate a biomechanical distraction that prevents a driver from being fully engaged in driving a vehicle. In particular, image data representative of an image of an occupant of a vehicle may be applied to one or more deep neural networks (DNNs). Using the DNNs, data indicative of key point locations corresponding to the occupant may be computed, a shape and/or a volume corresponding to the occupant may be reconstructed, a position and size of the occupant may be estimated, hand gesture activities may be classified, and/or body postures or poses may be classified. These determinations may be used to determine operations or settings for the vehicle to increase not only the safety of the occupants, but also of surrounding motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians.

A capacitive sensor includes: a substrate that is in the form of a sheet; and a sensor electrode that is capacitive and disposed on a frontside of the substrate. The sensor electrode is a conductive fabric made by applying a metal plating on a mesh fabric that is woven of a plurality of warps and a plurality of wefts and that has openings each formed by two adjacent warps among the plurality of warps and two adjacent wefts among the plurality of wefts. An area defined by a maximum outside diameter of a warp or weft is smaller than an area of an opening space of each of the openings.

A computer implemented method for detecting whether a seat belt is used in a vehicle comprises the following steps carried out by computer hardware components: acquiring an image of an interior of the vehicle; determining a plurality of sub-images based on the image; detecting, for at least one of the sub-images, whether a portion of the seat belt is present in the respective sub-image; and determining whether the seat belt is used based on the detecting.

An occupant position detection system includes an imaging device configured to capture an image of an occupant seated on a seat provided in an interior of a vehicle, a sensor provided on the seat, a first calculating unit configured to calculate a first position of the occupant from the image captured by the imaging device, a second calculating unit configured to calculate a second position of the occupant from a detection result of the sensor, an occupant position calculating unit configured to calculate an occupant position by fusing the first position and the second position, and an output unit configured to output information on the occupant position calculated by the occupant position calculating unit, to a safety device.

A vehicle steering wheel includes a hoop, a plurality of presence sensors and an outer sheath. The presence sensors are each arranged so as to detect a proximity and/or contact between a user's limb and the hoop. The outer sheath covers the plurality of presence sensors and is stitched with at least one seam that extends around at least part of the hoop. The plurality of presence sensors is mounted on the same support.

According to the present invention, a physique determination apparatus includes an image acquisition unit configured to acquire an image of an occupant, a facial feature point estimation unit configured to estimate facial feature points of the occupant based on the image, a head position estimation unit configured to estimate a relative position of a head of the occupant with respect to the camera based on the facial feature points, a body part estimation unit configured to estimate sizes of a plurality of parts of the occupant in the image, a skeleton estimation unit configured to estimate a skeleton size indicating an actual size of each part of the occupant based on the relative position and a size of each of the parts, and a physical determination unit configured to determine a physique of the occupant based on the skeleton size of each part of the occupant.

There is provided a system for improving safety of an occupant by an airbag, which can provide adaptive protection for occupants in different seat positions and different sitting postures. Further, there is provided a method for improving safety of an occupant by an airbag. Further, there is provided a computer-readable medium. The system for improving safety of an occupant by an airbag includes an in-vehicle observation system, an inflatable restraint system, a collision prediction system, and an integrated safety domain control unit. The integrated safety domain control unit formulates a deployment strategy based on data transmitted from the in-vehicle observation system, the inflatable restraint system, and the collision prediction system, to selectively inflate at least one airbag assembly and control an inflation volume for the airbag assembly to be inflated.

A safe exiting assistance system includes an object detector that detects an object which approaches from a rear side of a vehicle, a body detector that detects physical information of a passenger in the vehicle, a door opening/closing detector that detects door opening or closing information of the vehicle, a determiner that determines whether a situation requires alert to the passenger in response to detection results of the object detector and the door opening/closing detector and calculates a value sensed by the body detector in response to vehicle information set in advance, and a controller that differently controls a position and an irradiation angle of a light source in response to the physical information when information in which the alert is necessary is received from the determiner.

The present disclosure is directed to apparatuses, systems and methods for automatically classifying images of occupants inside a vehicle. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed to apparatuses, systems and methods for automatically classifying images of occupants inside a vehicle by comparing current image feature data to previously classified image features.

A computer implemented method for detecting whether a seat belt is used in a vehicle comprises the following steps carried out by computer hardware components: acquiring an image of an interior of the vehicle; determining a plurality of sub-images based on the image; detecting, for at least one of the sub-images, whether a portion of the seat belt is present in the respective sub-image; and determining whether the seat belt is used based on the detecting.