Method for obtaining information about an occupying item in a space in a vehicle in accordance with the invention includes obtaining images of an area above a seat in the vehicle in which the occupying item is situated and classifying the occupying item by inputting signals derived from the images into a trained neural network form which is trained to output an indication of the class of occupying item from one of a predetermined number of possible classes. The method is applicable for various vehicles including automobiles, trucks, buses, airplanes and boats. The images may be pre-processed to remove background portions of the images and then converted into signals for input into the neural network form.