1. A method of detecting an impact of a vehicle with a pedestrian, comprising the steps of: sensing deflections of a vehicle body panel at distributed locations of said body panel; collecting and storing the sensed deflections during impacts between said body panel and diversely shaped test objects to form a body of baseline calibration data; detecting an impact between said body panel and an unknown object when the deflection sensed at one or more of said distributed locations exceeds a threshold; correlating the sensed deflections due to the detected impact with the body of baseline calibration data to determine a shape of said unknown object; and determining if said unknown object is a pedestrian based in part on the determined shape.