A vehicle interior classification system and method determines a classification relating to the interior of the vehicle, such as the occupancy status of a vehicle seat or the state of alertness of a vehicle driver, from one or more images of an appropriate portion of the interior of the vehicle acquired with an image capture device. The acquired images may be processed to limit the dynamic range of the images to obtain a resultant image that includes one or more regions of interest which are less than the total field of view of the image capture device. The resultant images are processed to extract information about features in the image. The set of coefficients produced with suchprocessing can be reduced to a subset of the total number of coefficients, the members of the subset being selected for their ability to discriminate between the classifications defined for the system.