Occupancy detection in non-residential buildings – A survey and novel privacy preserved occupancy monitoring solution

Abstract

Buildings use approximately 40% of global energy and are responsible for almost a third of the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. They also utilise about 60% of the world’s electricity. In the last decade, stringent building regulations have led to significant improvements in the quality of the thermal characteristics of many building envelopes. However, similar considerations have not been paid to the number and activities of occupants in a building, which play an increasingly important role in energy consumption, optimisation processes, and indoor air quality. More than 50% of the energy consumption could be saved in Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV) if accurate information about the number of occupants is readily available (Mysen et al., 2005). But due to privacy concerns, designing a precise occupancy sensing/counting system is a highly challenging task. While several studies count the number of occupants in rooms/zones for the optimisation of energy consumption, insufficient information is available on the comparison, analysis and pros and cons of these occupancy estimation techniques. This paper provides a review of occupancy measurement techniques and also discusses research trends and challenges. Additionally, a novel privacy preserved occupancy monitoring solution is also proposed in this paper. Security analyses of the proposed scheme reveal that the new occupancy monitoring system is privacy preserved compared to other traditional schemes.

Experimental Evaluation of Reduction Technique for Time Delay of Turning Off Light to Occupancy Lighting Control

“…Third, the experiments should be conducted at different room geometry and furniture locations, which were not changed in our experiment. These factors strongly affect the sensing accuracy because both sensors require direct line‐of‐sight [45,46]. Based on these points, the plan for future lighting experiments should be structured.…”

Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings Technical Report Series: Whole-Building Controls, Sensors, Modeling, and Analytics

“…WiFi connectivity has also been proposed as a proxy (Jain et al 2016). Direct occupancy counting requires expensive hardware, such as cameras, and comes with privacy issues (Ahmad et al 2018).…”

RGB Color Sensors for Occupant Detection: An Alternative to PIR Sensors

“…Ultrasonic sensors, another method explored for occupancy detection, require motion for detection [1] and suffer from false positives, (e.g., moving air streams for the HVAC system can be mistaken for occupants [2]) resulting in unnecessary use of building resources. Ultrasonic sensors also have relatively high power consumption requirements, and most detrimentally, the requirement of occupant motion for detection means that Submitted: May 1, 2020.…”