Deep Weighted Fusion Learning(DWFL)-based multi-sensor fusion model for accurate building occupancy detection

With the advancement of artificial intelligence,the dominance of deep learning(DL)models over ordinary machine learning(ML)algorithms has become a reality in recent years due to its capability of handling complex pattern recognition without manual feature pre-definition.With the growing demands for power savings,building energy loss reduction could benefit from DL techniques.For buildings/rooms with the varying number of occupants,heating,ventilation,and air conditioning(HVAC)systems are often found in operations without much necessity.To reduce the building’s energy loss,accurate occupancy detection/prediction(ODP)results could be used to control the proper operations of HVACs.However,ODP is a challenging issue due to multiple reasons,such as improper selection/deployment of sensors,inefficient learning algorithms for pattern recognition,varying room conditions,etc.To overcome the above challenges,we propose a DL-based framework,i.e.,Deep Weighted Fusion Learning(DWFL),to detect and predict occupancy counts with optimal multi-sensor fusion structure.DWFL fuses the extracted features from multiple types of sensors with the priority/weight assignment to each sensor.Such weight assignment considers different room conditions and the pros/cons of each type of sensor.To evaluate DWFL model in terms of occupancy prediction accuracy,we have set up an experimental testbed with low-cost cameras,carbon dioxide(CO_(2)),and passive infrared(PIR)sensors.Among the recently proposed occupancy detection models,DeepFusion utilized deep learning model on heterogeneous sensor data and achieved 88%accuracy in occupancy count estimation(Xue et al.,2019).Another deep learning-based model MI-PIR achieved 91%accuracy on raw analog data from PIR sensors(Andrews et al.,2020).Our research outcome is 94%.Therefore,the experiment results show that our DWFL scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art ODP methods by 3%.