Human movement trajectory recording for home alone by thermopile array sensor

This paper proposes a human movement trajectory recording method by a thermopile array sensor. In the system, the sensor is attached to the ceiling and it acquires place-dependent temperatures, which is called thermal distribution. The system obtains 4 × 4 pixels thermal distributions from the sensor. The distributions are analyzed to extract human movement trajectory. First, human candidate pixels are detected by background removal with three fuzzy rules on temperature. Second, those pixels are separated by Connected Component Labeling. Then, each human area is identified. Third, human centroid is calculated. Human movement trajectory is defined as a path of those centroids and recorded at all times. In the experiment, subjects performed 15 motion patterns such as standing and walking for an adult male. The system measured each motion during 1~3 minutes. As the experimental result, the system successfully recorded accurate human movement trajectories in the all.