A Big Bang Big Crunch Type-2 Fuzzy Logic System for Machine Vision-Based Event Detection and Summarization in Real-world Ambient Assisted Living

The recent years have witnessed the prevalence and abundance of vision sensors in various applications such as security surveillance, healthcare and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) among others. This is so as to realize intelligent environments which are capable of detecting users’ actions and gestures so that the needed services can be provided automatically and instantly to maximize user comfort and safety as well as to minimize energy. However, it is very challenging to automatically detect important events and human behaviour from vision sensors and summarize them in real time. This is due to the massive data sizes related to video analysis applications and the high level of uncertainties associated with the real world unstructured environments occupied by various users. Machine vision based systems can help detect and summarize important information which cannot be detected by any other sensor; for example, how much water a candidate drank and whether or not they had something to eat. However, conventional non-fuzzy based methods are not robust enough to recognize the various complex types of behaviour in AAL applications. Fuzzy logic system (FLS) is an established field of research to robustly handle uncertainties in complicated real-world problems. In this thesis, we will present a general recognition and classification framework based on fuzzy logic systems which allows for behaviour recognition and event summarisation using 2D/3D video sensors in AAL applications. I started by investigating the use of 2D CCTV camera based system where I proposed and developed novel IT2FLS-based methods for silhouette extraction and 2D behaviour recognition which outperform the traditional on the publicly available Weizmann human action dataset. I will also present a novel system based on 3D RGB-D vision sensors and Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic based Systems (IT2FLSs) ) generated by the Big Bang Big Crunch (BB-BC) algorithm for the real time automatic detection and summarization of important events and human behaviour. I will present several real world experiments which were conducted for AAL related behaviour with various users. It will be shown that the proposed BB-BC IT2FLSs outperforms its Type-1 FLSs (T1FLSs) counterpart as well as other conventional non-fuzzy methods, and that performance improvement rises when the number of subjects increases. It will be shown that by utilizing the recognized output activity together with relevant event descriptions (such as video data, timestamp, location and user identification) detailed events are efficiently summarized and stored in our back-end SQL event database, which provides services including event searching, activity retrieval and high-definition video playback to the front-end user interfaces.