ACS-F2 — A new database of appliance consumption signatures

We present ACS-F2, a new electric consumption signature database acquired from domestic appliances. The scenario of use is appliance identification with emerging applications such as domestic electricity consumption understanding, load shedding management and indirect human activity monitoring. The novelty of our work is to use low-end electricity consumption sensors typically located at the plug. Our approach consists in acquiring signatures at a low frequency, which contrast with high frequency transient analysis approaches that are costlier and have been well studied in former research works. Electrical consumption signatures comprise real power, reactive power, RMS current, RMS voltage, frequency and phase of voltage relative to current. A total of 225 appliances were recorded over two sessions of one hour. The database is balanced with 15 different brands/models spread into 15 categories. Two realistic appliance recognition protocols are proposed and the database is made freely available to the scientific community for the experiment reproducibility. We also report on recognition results following these protocols and using baseline recognition algorithms like k-NN and GMM.