US 2,006,208,169 · Filed 2004-08-31
The Dual-Camera System That Knows Who's in Your Car Seat
Imagine two cameras inside your car both looking at the same spot—your passenger seat. By comparing what each camera sees, the car's computer can figure out exactly where a person or object is sitting and how far away it is, kind of like how your two eyes help you judge distance. This lets the airbag system decide whether to deploy and how hard.
The plain-English version
What it protects
The claim covers a safety system that uses two separate cameras positioned apart from each other to watch the same area inside a vehicle. What's protected here is the specific method of identifying the same object feature in both camera images and then using math (triangulation) to calculate the exact distance and position of that object. A competitor couldn't copy this dual-imager approach with the same pattern-recognition logic without infringing.
Why it matters
Cars need to know who or what is in a seat before deciding whether to deploy an airbag—deploy it wrong and you hurt the person you're trying to protect. This patent describes a clever way to map the inside of a vehicle using stereo vision (two cameras working together), which is much smarter than older single-sensor systems. It's a building block for modern occupant detection, which is now standard in all new cars for safety reasons.
Real-world use
When you sit in the passenger seat of a modern car, hidden cameras are already watching and measuring your position so the airbag system knows whether to fire and how hard. This patented method is part of that decision-making process.
Original USPTO abstract
System and method for obtaining information about occupancy of a compartment in a movable object in which at least first and second optical imagers obtain images of a common area of the compartment and spaced apart from one another. Processing circuitry derives information from the images obtained by the imagers. A light source may illuminate the common area of the compartment and be interposed between the imagers. The processing circuitry can include a microprocessor with at least one pattern recognition algorithm and be arranged to determine the distance between the imagers and an object in the common area by locating a specific feature in the common area by first locating the feature in only the image obtained by one imager, then determining the location of the same feature in the image obtained by another imager, and determining the distance of the feature from the imagers by triangulation.
Patent details
- Publication number
- US 2,006,208,169
- Filing date
- 2004-08-31
- Grant date
- Application — not yet granted
- Assignee
- Breed David S / Duvall Wilbur E / Johnson Wendell C
- Inventor(s)
- BREED DAVID S., DUVALL WILBUR E., JOHNSON WENDELL C.
- CPC class
- B60R21/01542
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