Human Occupancy Detection via Passive Cognitive Radio

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 20; no. 15; p. 4248
• Main Authors: Liu, Jenny, Mu, Huaizheng, Vakil, Asad, Ewing, Robert, Shen, Xiaoping, Blasch, Erik, Li, Jia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI 30.07.2020; MDPI AG
• Subjects: adaptive spectrum sensing; Algorithms; Cognition; feature selection; human occupancy detection; Humans; Logistic Models; Machine Learning; Motor Vehicles; Non-Medical Public and Private Facilities; passive cognitive radio; Radio Waves; reconfigurable software defined radio; Support Vector Machine; human occupancy detection; adaptive spectrum sensing; passive cognitive radio; reconfigurable software defined radio; feature selection
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s20154248

Human occupancy detection (HOD) in an enclosed space, such as indoors or inside of a vehicle, via passive cognitive radio (CR) is a new and challenging research area. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that a human subject cannot easily be detected due to spectrum variation. In this paper, we present an advanced HOD system that dynamically reconfigures a CR to collect passive radio frequency (RF) signals at different places of interest. Principal component analysis (PCA) and recursive feature elimination with logistic regression (RFE-LR) algorithms are applied to find the frequency bands sensitive to human occupancy when the baseline spectrum changes with locations. With the dynamically collected passive RF signals, four machine learning (ML) classifiers are applied to detect human occupancy, including support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), decision tree (DT), and linear SVM with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training. The experimental results show that the proposed system can accurately detect human subjects—not only in residential rooms—but also in commercial vehicles, demonstrating that passive CR is a viable technique for HOD. More specifically, the RFE-LR with SGD achieves the best results with a limited number of frequency bands. The proposed adaptive spectrum sensing method has not only enabled robust detection performance in various environments, but also improved the efficiency of the CR system in terms of speed and power consumption.