System and Method for triggering a Safety Device in a Motor Vehicle comprising a Signal Space Crash Discriminator

摘要

A system and method for triggering a vehicle safety device in response to a crash or sudden vehicle deceleration includes conversion of an analog signal generated by an acceleration sensor and representative of instantaneous vehicle acceleration to a digital value and using a ROM lookup table to determine its natural log. An autocorrelation of the log values of the acceleration data is determined and thereafter used to calculate first and second basis vector values. A safety device trigger signal is generated by a signal space discriminator when a value calculated from the first and second basis vector values exceeds a threshold value therefor.