In lack of ready-to-go solutions for my house, I decided to take on my duty and build my own solution - making sure that it can easily be replicated by anyone.
The differences are staggering: I trained the optical model on more than ten thousands 640x480 images taken all through a week in different lighting conditions, while I trained the thermal camera model on a dataset of 900 24x32 images taken during a single day.Įven with more complex network architectures, the optical model wouldn’t score above a 91% accuracy in detecting the presence of people, while the thermal model would achieve around 99% accuracy within a single training phase of a simpler neural network.ĭespite the high potential, there’s not much out there in the market - there’s been some research work on the topic (if you google “people detection thermal camera” you’ll mostly find research papers) and a few high-end and expensive products for professional surveillance. And, unlike optical cameras, they detect bodies by measuring the heat that they emit in the form of infrared radiation, and are therefore much more robust - their sensitivity doesn’t depend on lighting conditions, on the position of the target, or the colour.īefore exploring the thermal camera solution, I tried for a while to build a model that instead relied on optical images from a traditional webcam. Unlike motion sensors, they will detect the presence of people even when they aren’t moving. Thermal cameras coupled with deep neural networks are a much more robust strategy to actually detect the presence of people. Detecting the presence of people in your room while you’re not at home is another interesting application.
The ability to turn off music and/or tv when you exit the room and head to your bedroom, without the hassle of switching all the buttons off, is also an interesting corollary. Most of the solutions out there to solve these kinds of problems, even more high-end solutions like the Philips Hue sensors, detect motion, not actual people presence - which means that the lights will switch off once you lay on your couch like a sloth. Having your house to turn the lights on or off when you enter or exit your living room is an interesting application, for instance. Triggering reliable events based on the presence of people has been the dream of many geeks and DIY automators for a while.