Patent ID: 8553992

Claim:
A method of determining the class and attributes of an occupant object in an occupancy space, comprising: capturing an infra-red image of a plurality of occupant objects in said occupancy space; digitizing infra-red image information of said captured infra-red image to obtain a thermal signature of the occupancy space comprising said occupant objects; identifying said occupant objects in said digitized infra-red image and ascribing shapes to each of said occupant objects; comparing each of said identified occupant objects with a thermal signature database to determine if each of said occupant objects meets a given class and said attributes of said given class, comprising: performing a plurality of passes through a binary tree structure in said thermal signature database, said binary tree structure describing class characteristics and said attributes of said given class, said step of performing said passes comprises: performing a first pass, comprising assigning a probability to each of said occupant objects in said occupancy space, wherein said first pass further comprises assigning a higher probability to an occupant object which meets the class characteristics and the attributes of said given class; and performing a plurality of other passes, comprising: comparing occupant objects having said higher probability against specific class characteristics and specific attributes of said given class; and utilizing successive image captures in each of said other passes.