Patent Document ID: 9996757
Application ID: 15181628
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A device for detecting various vehicle operator actions by tracking vehicle occupant postures using image recognition, the device comprising: at least one vehicle interior sensor for acquiring at least one image sequence of at least one vehicle occupant; a memory for storing the current image data, vehicle occupant posture data relating to the current image data, a current image data receiving module, a previously classified interior data receiving module, a skeletal pose data generation module, and a vehicle operator action detection module; and a processor that is configured to determine a vehicle operation mode by: receiving previously classified image data from at least one previously classified image database in response to the processor executing a previously classified vehicle interior data receiving module, wherein the previously classified image data is representative of previously classified vehicle operator actions; receiving current image data from the at least one vehicle interior sensor in response to the processor executing the current image data receiving module, wherein the current image data is representative of current vehicle operator action; creating a vehicle occupant posture record for the at least one vehicle occupant comprising the vehicle interior data of the at least one vehicle occupant; extracting three-dimensional coordinate spatial locations of at least one joint location of the at least one vehicle occupant from the vehicle interior data, the three-dimensional coordinate spatial locations of at least one joint location of the at least one vehicle occupant are stored in the vehicle occupant posture record as vehicle occupant posture data relating to the vehicle interior data; recognizing and tracking postures of the at least one vehicle occupant in the image sequence as vehicle occupant posture data by processing the three-dimensional coordinate spatial locations of at least one joint location of the at least one vehicle occupant and the previously classified interior data using the stored skeletal pose data generation model; detecting a vehicle operator action based on a comparison of the current image data with the previously classified image data in response to the processor executing the vehicle operator action detection module that includes a probability function; and automatically updating the vehicle occupant posture record with the vehicle posture data.