Building Occupancy Detection and Localisation using CCTV Camera and Deep Learning

Occupancy information plays a key role in analysing and improving building energy performance. The advances of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have engendered a shift in measuring building occupancy with IoT sensors, in which cameras in Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems can provide richer measurements. However, existing camera-based occupancy detection approaches cannot function well when scanning videos with a number of occupants and determining occupants’ locations. This paper aims to develop a novel deep learning based approach for better building occupancy detection based on CCTV cameras. To doing so, this research proposes a deep learning model to detect the number of occupants and determine their locations in videos. This model consists of two main modules namely feature extraction and three-stage occupancy detection. The first module presents a deep convolutional neural network to perform residual and multi-branch convolutional calculation to extract shallow and semantic features, and constructs feature pyramids through a bi-directional feature network. The second module performs a three-stage detection procedure with three sequential and homogeneous detectors which have increasing Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds. Empirical experiments evaluate the detection performance of the approach with CCTV videos from a university building. Experimental results show that the approach achieves superior detection performance when compared with baseline models.