Fusion of Environmental Sensors for Occupancy Detection in a Real Construction Site

Abstract

Internet-of-Things systems are increasingly being installed in buildings to transform them into smart ones and to assist in the transition to a greener future. A common feature of smart buildings, whether commercial or residential, is environmental sensing that provides information about temperature, dust, and the general air quality of indoor spaces, assisting in achieving energy efficiency. Environmental sensors though, especially when combined, can also be used to detect occupancy in a space and to increase security and safety. The most popular methods for the combination of environmental sensor measurements are concatenation and neural networks that can conduct fusion in different levels. This work presents an evaluation of the performance of multiple late fusion methods in detecting occupancy from environmental sensors installed in a building during its construction and provides a comparison of the late fusion approaches with early fusion followed by ensemble classifiers. A novel weighted fusion method, suitable for imbalanced samples, is also tested. The data collected from the environmental sensors are provided as a public dataset.

Keywords

• occupancy detection
• environmental sensing
• sensor fusion
• smart buildings