Predicting the occupancy related information in an environment has been investigated to satisfy the myriad requirements of various evolving pervasive, ubiquitous, opportunistic and participatory sensing applications. Infrastructure and ambient sensors based techniques have been leveraged largely to determine the occupancy of an environment incurring a significant deployment and retrofitting costs. In this paper, we advocate an infrastructure-less zero-configuration multimodal smartphone sensor-based techniques to detect fine-grained occupancy information. We propose to exploit opportunistically smartphones' acoustic sensors in presence of human conversation and motion sensors in absence of any conversational data. We develop a novel speaker estimation algorithm based on unsupervised clustering of overlapped and non-overlapped conversational data to determine the number of occupants in a crowded environment. We also design a hybrid approach combining acoustic sensing opportunistically with locomotive model to further improve the occupancy detection accuracy. We evaluate our algorithms in different contexts, conversational, silence and mixed in presence of 10 domestic users. Our experimental results on real-life data traces collected from 10 occupants in natural setting show that using this hybrid approach we can achieve approximately 0.76 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average. 
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                            Infrastructure-less Occupancy Detection and Semantic Localization in Smart Environments
                        
                    
    
            Accurate estimation of localized occupancy related information in real time enables a broad range of intelligent smart environment applications. A large number of studies using heterogeneous sensor arrays reflect the myriad requirements of various emerging pervasive, ubiquitous and participatory sensing applications. In this paper, we introduce a zero-configuration and infrastructure-less smartphone based location specific occupancy estimation model. We opportunistically exploit smartphone’s acoustic sensors in a conversing environment and motion sensors in absence of any conversational data. We demonstrate a novel speaker estimation algorithm based on unsupervised clustering of overlapped and non-overlapped conversational data and a change point detection algorithm for locomotive motion of the users to infer the occupancy. We augment our occupancy detection model with a fingerprinting based methodology using smartphone’s magnetometer sensor to accurately assimilate location information of any gathering. We postulate a novel crowdsourcing-based approach to annotate the semantic location of the occupancy. We evaluate our algorithms in different contexts; conversational, silence and mixed in presence of 10 domestic users. Our experimental results on real-life data traces in natural settings show that using this hybrid approach, we can achieve approximately 0.76 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1344990
- PAR ID:
- 10073266
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MOBIQUITOUS'15 proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services on 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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