Engineering RGBIR Lenses for Automotive In-Cabin Monitoring: Design Challenges and Manufacturing Realities for OMS and DOMS

In-cabin monitoring is at an inflection point. Regulatory mandates — most notably the EU General Safety Regulation requiring driver monitoring in all new passenger vehicles — are driving volume adoption of DMS, while OMS is expanding rapidly to address child presence detection, occupant safety, and personalized comfort features. At the same time, the industry is converging on higher-resolution RGBIR sensors as the foundation for both dedicatedand consolidated  monitoring architectures, and the 5MP sensors with sensitivity across the visible and IR spectrum are now entering mass production for automotive in-cabin programs. 

Whether a program calls for a dedicated driver-facing camera, a dedicated occupant camera, or a single consolidated DOMS solution, the optical subsystem faces the same fundamental challenge: an RGBIR lens must deliver high, consistent image quality across a broad wavelength, across a wide field of view, in a small form factor, and prove itself through full automotive reliability testing. Drawing on hands-on experience designing and manufacturing RGBIR lenses for production automotive in-cabin programs, this talk offers an insight into the optical design and manufacturing decisions that most directly determine system performance — relevant to engineers working on any incabin monitoring architecture.