A method for determining a presence of an occupant within a vehicle includes capturing, via a driver facing camera, video image data, including a plurality of image frames of a field-of-view of the driver facing camera. At least one area-of-interest within the image frames is defined, and a foreground pixel count of each image frame of each area-of-interest is determined. At each Nth image frame, an occupancy for each area of interest is determined based at least in part on the foreground pixel count. The occupancy indicates whether the occupant is present or absent in the respective area-of-interest. A history of the occupancy determination for each area-of-interest is maintained, and a final status for each area-of-interest is determined based on the respective history of occupancy. External indicators are initiated based on the final status determination.