3-D pose tracking of the car occupant

Abstract

Although airbags in the car play an important role for the safety of occupants, in fact, many peoples have been injured or killed by the deployment of airbags themselves. Such conventional airbags are deployed by the shock sensors. As an alternative approach, a vision-based smart airbag system could be promising. This paper describes a new method by which 3-D pose of the car occupant can be recognized. We combine 2-D head tracking information with a disparity map of the occupant for 3-D pose tracking. Result shows that the system can locate the head position around the passenger's seat with a real-time basis. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.