There is a growing demand for efficient and privacy-preserving intelligent solutions in a multi-occupancy environment. This paper proposes a non-contact scheme for occupancy estimation using an infrared thermal sensor array, which has the advantages of low-cost, low-power, and high-performance capabilities. The proposed scheme offers an accurate human heat segmentation technique that extracts human body temperature from a noisy environment. It is shown that the proposed system can detect the empty occupancy state after utilising the segmentation technique with an accuracy of 100%. By using adaptive boosting, it is shown that the system is capable of measuring the non-empty occupancy with an overall accuracy of 98.2%.