A system architecture for an intelligent airbag deployment

Airbags can save or kill. Does your airbag know the difference? During the pre-crash braking, a passenger may be thrown against the dashboard area in immediate proximity to the airbag. On the other hand, an airbag inflates in less than 1/25th of a second so that driver and passengers who are too close to the airbag can receive serious or even fatal head and neck injuries from the deploying airbag. And so there are large efforts to conceive an intelligent airbag control which corresponds to the concept of a "humane" accident composition. In or paper we describe a system architecture for an intelligent airbag deployment inside vehicles. Using image sequences acquired from a stereo camera, we detect the form and the position of the driver and passenger seat. If a seat is classified as occupied by any object we try to estimate the geometry and location of the human's head as the most distinguishing feature of the body, if it is possible. The information about the seat occupation and the location of detected passengers inside the vehicle can be used as control parameters for an intelligent airbag deployment.