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Multimodal identification and tracking in smart environments

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Abstract

We present a model for unconstrained and unobtrusive identification and tracking of people in smart environments and answering queries about their whereabouts. Our model supports biometric recognition based upon multiple modalities such as face, gait, and voice in a uniform manner. The key technical idea underlying our approach is to abstract a smart environment by a state transition system in which each state records a set of individuals who are present in various zones of the environment. Since biometric recognition is inexact, state information is inherently probabilistic in nature. An event abstracts a biometric recognition step, and the transition function abstracts the reasoning necessary to effect state transitions. In this manner, we are able to integrate different biometric modalities uniformly and also different criteria for state transitions. Fusion of biometric modalities is also supported by our model. We define performance metrics for a smart environment in terms of the concepts of ‘precision’ and ‘recall’. We have developed a prototype implementation of our proposed concepts and provide experimental results in this paper. Our conclusion is that the state transition model is an effective abstraction of a smart environment and serves as a good basis for developing practical systems.

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Notes

  1. Face images blurred to preserve anonymity.

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Acknowledgments

This work was done while Vivek Menon was a Visiting Research Scientist at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS), University at Buffalo. Thanks to Philip Kilinskas for his help in developing the experimental prototype; Dr. Jason J. Corso for discussions on Markov models; and members of CUBS for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper [16].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amrita University, Coimbatore, 641105, 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

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

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Menon, V., Jayaraman, B. & Govindaraju, V. Multimodal identification and tracking in smart environments. Pers Ubiquit Comput 14, 685–694 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-010-0288-6

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