Interfacing life: a year in the life of a research lab

ABSTRACT

Humans perceive life around them through a variety of sensory inputs. Some, such as vision, or audition, have high information content, while others, such as touch and smell, do not. Humans and other animals use this gradation of senses to know how to attend to what's important.

In contrast, it is widely accepted that in tasks of monitoring living spaces the modalities with high information content hold the key to decoding the behavior and intentions of the space occupants. In surveillance, video cameras are used to record everything that they can possibly see in the hopes that if something happens, it can later be found in the recorded data. Unfortunately, the latter proved to be harder than it sounds.

In our work we challenge this idea and introduce a monitoring system that is built as a combination of channels with varying information content. The system has been deployed for over a year in our lab space and consists of a large motion sensor network combined with several video cameras. While the sensors give a general context of the events in the entire 3000 square meters of the space, cameras only attend to selected occurrences of the office activities. The system demonstrates several monitoring tasks which are all but impossible to perform in a traditional camera-only setting.

In the talk we share our experiences, challenges and solutions in building and maintaining the system. We show some results from the data that we have collected for the period of over a year and introduce some other successful and novel applications of the system.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding
            Subjects: Motion

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding
            Subjects: Video analysis

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors, Security

Keywords:
heterogenenous sensor networks, human behavior and analysis