An Infrared Array Sensor-Based Method for Localizing and Counting People for Health Care and Monitoring

To build a system for monitoring elderly people living alone, an important step needs to be done: identifying the presence/absence of the person being monitored and his location. Such task has several applications that we discuss in this paper, and remains very important. Several techniques were proposed in the literature. However, most of them suffer from issues related to privacy, coverage or convenience. In the current paper, we propose an infrared array sensor-based approach to detect the presence/absence of a person in a room. We used a wide angle low resolution sensor (i.e., 32×24 pixels) to collect heat-related information from the area monitored, and used Deep Learning (DL) to identify the presence of up to 3 people with an accuracy reaching 97%. Our approach also detects of the presence or absence of a person with a 100% accuracy. Nevertheless, it allows identifying the location of the detected people within a room of dimensions 4×7.4 m with a margin of 0.3 m.