Postural information of drivers is helpful for specifying take-over control as well as for developing intelligent protection systems in autonomous vehicles. Thanks to the ease of use and the robust performance under varying environments, a pressure sensor could be a good alternative or complementary to cameras for monitoring drivers’ postures, especially for the trunk and feet. However, association between pressure distribution and posture is still unclear, effective methods for
ostural classification from pressure measurement therefore need to be developed. The objective of this study was to propose a method for extracting relevant features from the original pressure distribution data to predict drivers’ posture. First, a large number of pressure parameters, including contact area proportions, centres of pressure and pressure ratios, were defined for generating pressure features and the relevancy was analysed by performing the Out-Of-Bag feature importance evaluation of a Random Forest classifier. Finally, the relative value changes of 15 important parameters were used as features for training the classifier, leading to an average accuracy of 77.4% across nine posture classes and 23 drivers in the Leave-One-Out cross-validation tests. This study will provide valuable insight for extracting features in order to develop robust postural monitoring systems using pressure measurement.