Ford Global Technolgoies, LLC

Martin Van Hoeckel

Brian Bennie

Jonathan Diedrich

Nicholas Alexander Scheufler

Mark Gehrke

Jake S Schwartz

Eric Robert Krieger

A vehicle characterizes a sunload on the vehicle using an imaging system including at least one camera capturing image data (e.g., without using an ambient light sensor). The image data includes at least a portion of a passenger cabin. A region of interest (ROI) overlay receives the image data and extracts selected image data according to predetermined scene elements of the vehicle environment. An occupant overlay is configured to detect a vehicle occupant represented in the selected image data and configured to generate truncated image data by subtracting image data corresponding to the vehicle occupant from the selected image data. An ambient light model uses environmental parameters including a sun position to estimate an expected sunload range. A mapper generates a sunload map comprising respective sunload values for a plurality of locations on the vehicle according to the truncated image data and the expected sunload range.

Growing community of inventors

Woodstock, Canada

Martin Van Hoeckel