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Probabilistic spatio-temporal retrieval in smart spaces

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Abstract

A ‘smart space’ is one that automatically identifies and tracks its occupants using unobtrusive biometric modalities such as face, gait, and voice in an unconstrained fashion. Information retrieval in a smart space is concerned with the location and movement of people over time. Towards this end, we abstract a smart space by a probabilistic state transition system in which each state records the probabilities of presence of individuals in various zones of the smart space. We carry out track-based reasoning on the states in order to determine more accurately the occupants of the smart space. This leads to a data model based upon an occupancy relation in which time is treated discretely, owing to the discrete nature of events, but probability is treated as a real-valued attribute. Using this data model, we show how to formulate a number of spatio-temporal queries, focusing on the computation of probabilities, an aspect that is novel to this model. We present queries both in SQL syntax and also in CLP(R), a constraint logic programming language (with reals) which facilitates succinct formulation of recursive queries. We show that the answers to certain queries are better displayed in a graphical manner, especially the movement tracks of occupants of the smart space. We also define query-dependent precision and recall metrics in order to quantify how well the model is able to answer various spatio-temporal queries. We show that a query-dependent metric gives significantly better results for a class of occupancy-related queries compared with query-independent metrics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kochi, 682041, India

    Vivek Menon

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Bharat Jayaraman

  3. Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Venu Govindaraju

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  1. Vivek Menon
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  2. Bharat Jayaraman
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  3. Venu Govindaraju
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Correspondence to Vivek Menon.

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Menon, V., Jayaraman, B. & Govindaraju, V. Probabilistic spatio-temporal retrieval in smart spaces. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 5, 383–392 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-013-0199-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-013-0199-2

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