Occupant-Centric Cabin Thermal Sensation Assessment System Based on Low-Cost Thermal Imaging

Assessing cabin occupants' thermal sensation in real-time enables automatic control of car air conditioning, improving driving safety and energy efficiency. Traditional methods, limited by their need for numerous physiological parameters, have restricted practicality. For this purpose, this study employs a low-cost thermal imaging sensor as the hardware core to establish a cost-effective and non-contact real-time assessment system for thermal comfort of occupants within a cabin. The system comprises a thermal sensation assessment model developed based on subject experiments, along with facial recognition and segmentation algorithms optimized for thermal images. The thermal sensation assessment model developed, which employs cheek temperature, solar radiation intensity, and cabin air temperature as its features, exhibited a R2 of 0.617 on the test set. Furthermore, the facial recognition algorithm established for thermographic imaging achieved a mean accuracy of 96.5% and a recall rate of 99.0%. The system underwent validation in real-world vehicle environments, proving its ability to accurately detect and measure the cheek temperatures of occupants in the cabin and execute thermal sensation assessments. With a mean absolute error of 0.5 thermal sensation units in its output, its accuracy in practical applications was affirmed. This research provides an effective solution for automatically adjusting cabin air conditioning.