DTS Shows Single-Camera Driver-Occupant Monitoring at CES

DTS introduced a single-camera driver and occupancy monitoring technology at CES that’s said to lower system-level integration, calibration and installation costs vs. multicamera solutions, said the Xperi subsidiary Wednesday. Most vehicles that offer driver sensing today use a camera focused solely on the driver, but the ability to sense the rest of the cabin and its occupants has become critical and an important safety requirement moving forward, said Jeff Jury, Xperi general manager-connected car. Other technology needs a second camera to focus on everything but the driver, which can be complicated to implement; the DTS AutoSense is designed for a wide field-of-view camera, Jury said. DTS AutoSense supports features such as attention zones, manual distraction, activity detection (eating, drinking, talking on the phone and texting), hands on steering wheel detection, seat occupancy, age classification (adult, child), body skeleton detection, hand detection, face recognition, object detection, pet detection, drowsiness and body pose classification, the company said. The camera can be positioned under the rearview mirror or in the center information display. The technology uses AI and machine learning to ensure the quality and reliability of the driver’s drowsiness or attentiveness analytics based on overall activity rather than just on face and eyes analytics, DTS said. It's deployed using edge computing vs. cloud connectivity so all data remains in the vehicle, DTS said.