Assessing opportunities for enhanced lighting energy conservation via occupancy and daylight monitoring

RELX, Gala, D., Khetan, S., & Mehendale, N. (2024). Assessing opportunities for enhanced lighting energy conservation via occupancy and daylight monitoring. Measurement: Energy, 3, 100015.
Authors: 
Dhairye Gala, Shreya Khetan, Ninad Mehendale

Efficient energy utilization in buildings is crucial for sustainability. This work proposes an intelligent system that leverages computer vision techniques and CCTV images to assess indoor lighting energy usage based on occupancy, artificial lighting, and daylight conditions. Object detection models - You Only Look Once (YOLO) version 3 (v3) and v8 are employed to detect people, lights, and windows, achieving promising accuracies of 94.9 ​%, 73.3 ​%, and 98.7 ​%, respectively. The system categorizes scenarios as energy-efficient, wasteful, or neutral by integrating these outputs, highlighting opportunities for improving efficiency by harmonizing lighting infrastructure with occupancy and daylight exposure. Performance analyses, including training and validation metrics, are presented. This study demonstrates the potential of computer vision and AI for optimizing energy utilization, enabling sustainable building operation and promoting energy-positive occupant behaviors through sensor-driven methodologies.