Abstract

An in-vehicle monitoring system may use various vehicle speakers and various microphones to determine the presence and location of occupants within a vehicle (e.g., an automobile, a motorcycle, a bus, a recreational vehicle (RV), a semi-trailer truck, a tractor or other type of farm equipment, a train, a plane, a boat, a helicopter, a personal transport vehicle, etc.) using ultrasonic sound frequencies. The in-vehicle monitoring system may include a vehicle head unit, audio system, or other device, which may in turn cause vehicle speakers, such as one or more speakers built into the vehicle, other speakers located within the vehicle, etc.) to output one or more ultrasonic frequencies within the vehicle. Various microphones included within the vehicle (e.g., one or more microphones built into the vehicle, one or more microphones included in devices, such as smartphones, located within the vehicle, etc.) may detect reflections of the ultrasonic frequencies from objects within the vehicle. The vehicle head unit, mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, etc.), or a remote server (e.g., a cloud computing system) may analyze or process the detected ultrasonic frequencies (e.g., by using cross-correlation and envelope-detection) to determine whether one or more occupants are located within the vehicle and whether any of the occupants are moving within the vehicle. In various instances, different speakers within the vehicle may output different ultrasonic frequencies to determine the position of any occupants within the vehicle. The in-vehicle monitoring system may use (e.g., by the vehicle head unit) such information about any occupants detected in the vehicle to automatically adjust audio settings, automatically start and/or stop an engine, automatically lock and/or unlock the vehicle, etc.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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