Driver body-height prediction for an ergonomically optimized ingress using a single omnidirectional camera

Maximizing passengers comfort is an important research topic in the domain of automotive systems engineering. In particular, an automatic adjustment of seat position according to driver height significantly increases the level of comfort during ingress. In this paper, we present a new method to estimate the height of approaching car drivers based on a single omnidirectional camera integrated with the side-view mirror of a car. Towards this, we propose mathematical descriptions of standard parking scenarios, allowing for an accurate height estimation. First, approaching drivers are extracted from image frames captured by the camera. Second, the scenario and height are initially estimated based on gathered samples of angles to head and foot-points of an approaching driver. An iterative optimization process removes outliers and refines the initially estimated scenario and height. Finally, we present a number of experimental results based on image sequences captured from real-life ingress scenarios.