Learning-Based Non-Intrusive Electric Load Monitoring for Smart Energy Management

State-of-the-art smart cities have been calling for economic but efficient energy management over a large-scale network, especially for the electric power system. It is a critical issue to monitor, analyze, and control electric loads of all users in the system. In this study, a non-intrusive load monitoring method was designed for smart power management using computer vision techniques popular in artificial intelligence. First of all, one-dimensional current signals are mapped onto two-dimensional color feature images using signal transforms (including the wavelet transform and discrete Fourier transform) and Gramian Angular Field (GAF) methods. Second, a deep neural network with multi-scale feature extraction and attention mechanism is proposed to recognize all electrical loads from the color feature images. Third, a cloud-based approach was designed for the non-intrusive monitoring of all users, thereby saving energy costs during power system control. Experimental results on both public and private datasets demonstrate that the method achieves superior performances compared to its peers, and thus supports efficient energy management over a large-scale Internet of Things network.