A Novel Thermal Imaging and Machine Learning Based Privacy Preserving Framework for Efficient Space Allocation, Utilisation and Management

Most companies and organisations face notorious challenges in space management. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks attempt to pave the way to get space allocation information about the environment using sensors. However, the deployment of sensors and IoT tags is not cost-effective for large offices. Therefore, this work aims to develop a novel privacy-preserving framework based on thermal imaging cameras and machine learning (ML) techniques in order to monitor space allocation remotely. Hence, to utilise and manage dedicated and unused space appropriately. The work analyses the progress of the proposed methodology via several Deep Learning (DL) techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT). The experimental results indicated that Visual Geometry Group (VGG) 16 model outperforms other models such as ViT, ResNet50, AlexNet and etc. In addition, a web application has been developed to select a model that is preferred to identify human occupancy in real-time and, therefore, to process space monitoring and utilisation remotely in large office settings.