AI-Powered In-Vehicle Passenger Monitoring Using Low-Cost mm-Wave Radar

We propose a novel algorithm to identify occupied seats in a motor vehicle, i.e., the number of occupants and their positions, using a frequency modulated continuous wave radar. Instead of using a high-resolution radar, which increases the cost and device size, and performing complex signal processing with several variables to be tuned for each scenario, we integrate machine learning algorithms with a low-cost radar system. Based on heat maps obtained from the Capon beamformer, we train a machine classifier to predict the number of occupants and their positions in a vehicle. We follow two different classification methods: multiclass classification and binary classification. We compare three classifiers: support vector machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Random Forest (RF), in terms of accuracy and computational complexity for both testing and training sets. Our proposed system using an SVM classifier achieved an overall accuracy of 97% in classifying the defined scenarios in both multiclass classification and binary classification methods. In addition, to show the effectiveness of our proposed in-vehicle occupancy detection method, we provide the results of a commonly available people counting and tracking method for occupancy detection. Compared to common methods, the effectiveness, robustness, and accuracy of our proposed in-vehicle occupancy detection method are demonstrated.