Synthetic Generation of Passive Infrared Motion Sensor Data Using a Game Engine

Quantifying the number of occupants in an indoor space is useful for a wide variety of applications. Attempts have been made at solving the task using passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor data together with supervised learning methods. Collecting a large labeled dataset containing both PIR motion sensor data and ground truth people count is however time-consuming, often requiring one hour of observation for each hour of data gathered. In this paper, a method is proposed for generating such data synthetically. A simulator is developed in the Unity game engine capable of producing synthetic PIR motion sensor data by detecting simulated occupants. The accuracy of the simulator is tested by replicating a real-world meeting room inside the simulator and conducting an experiment where a set of choreographed movements are performed in the simulated environment as well as the real room. In 34 out of 50 tested situations, the output from the simulated PIR sensors is comparable to the output from the real-world PIR sensors. The developed simulator is also used to study how a PIR sensor’s output changes depending on where in a room a motion is carried out. Through this, the relationship between sensor output and spatial position of a motion is discovered to be highly non-linear, which highlights some of the difficulties associated with mapping PIR data to occupancy count.