Adult and Child Classification using Automotive Radar for In-cabin Monitoring

Abstract

The awareness and decision-making about the unattended child or pet inside a car is one of the emerging features in autonomous vehicles as a precaution to prevent hot car death. The automotive radars can provide the Doppler and spatial information about in-cabin passengers. This paper proposes to extract the range-Doppler images from the IQ radar data and process them using CNNs to classify the passenger as an adult or child. The IWR1642 radar module is used to collect the passenger details in both space and time within the car. A novel CNN architecture is proposed by trading off the accuracy and lightweight characteristics of the network. The proposed architecture provides 97.74± 0.34 accuracy (with 18.32 MB size) compared to the denseNet201 of 99.13± 0.3 (with 71.3 MB size) accuracy. The proposed architecture is compared against the existing pre-trained models like InceptionNet, MobileNet, EfficientNet, NASNet, VGGNet, DenseNet, ResNet, and Xception regarding accuracy and size. © 2024 IEEE.