Accurate Trajectory Prediction in a Smart Building using Recurrent Neural Networks

Occupant behavioral patterns, once extracted, could reveal cues about activities and space usage that could effectively get used for building systems to achieve energy savings. The ability to accurately predict the trajectories of occupants inside a room branched into different zones has many notable and compelling applications. For example - efficient space utilization and floor plans, intelligent building operations, crowd management, comfortable indoor environment, security, and evacuation or managing personnel. This paper proposes future occupant trajectory prediction using state-of-the-art time series prediction methods, i.e., Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models. These models are being implemented and compared to forecast occupant trajectories at a given time and location in a non-intrusive and reliable manner. The considered test-space for the collection of the dataset is a multi-utility area in an instrumented public building. The deployed 3D Stereo Vision Cameras capture the spatial location coordinates (x- and y- coordinates) from a bird's view angle without eliciting any other information that could reveal confidential data or uniquely identify a person. Our results showed that the GRU model forecasts were considerably more accurate than the LSTM model for the trajectory prediction. GRU prediction model achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 30.72 cm between actual and predicted location coordinates, and LSTM achieved an MSE of 47.13 cm, respectively, for multiple occupant trajectories within the monitored area. Another evaluation metric Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is used, and the GRU prediction model achieved an MAE of 3.14 cm, and the LSTM model achieved an MAE of 4.07 cm. The GRU model guarantees a high-fidelity occupant trajectory prediction for any given case with higher accuracy when compared to the baseline LSTM model.