Modeling and assessing quality of information in multisensor multimedia monitoring systems

Abstract

Current sensor-based monitoring systems use multiple sensors in order to identify high-level information based on the events that take place in the monitored environment. This information is obtained through low-level processing of sensory media streams, which are usually noisy and imprecise, leading to many undesired consequences such as false alarms, service interruptions, and often violation of privacy. Therefore, we need a mechanism to compute the quality of sensor-driven information that would help a user or a system in making an informed decision and improve the automated monitoring process. In this article, we propose a model to characterize such quality of information in a multisensor multimedia monitoring system in terms of certainty, accuracy/confidence and timeliness. Our model adopts a multimodal fusion approach to obtain the target information and dynamically compute these attributes based on the observations of the participating sensors. We consider the environment context, the agreement/disagreement among the sensors, and their prior confidence in the fusion process in determining the information of interest. The proposed method is demonstrated by developing and deploying a real-time monitoring system in a simulated smart environment. The effectiveness and suitability of the method has been demonstrated by dynamically assessing the value of the three quality attributes with respect to the detection and identification of human presence in the environment.