A new hybrid and dynamic fusion of multiple experts for intelligent porch system

Intelligent porch research is an important issue in smart home development; however, such a field was rarely investigated in the literature. This investigation proposes a new hybrid and dynamic fusion of multiple experts for the intelligent porch system. First, a new hybrid priority tree with decision fusion (HPTD-fusion) is proposed to eliminate the problems of tag-based authentication outdoors. The HPTD-fusion first verifies the vocal entrance code (VEC), and subsequently the remaining experts are performed in the cases of AND, OR or majority voting for decision fusion. Second, the post-mapping dynamic weighted fusion (PMDW-fusion) scheme is presented to adapt the indoor porch audio-visual environment. The PMDW-fusion dynamically assigns the higher weight to experts with higher performance, and then sums all participating experts for score fusion. The experimental results demonstrate that FRR and FAR can reach up to 0.18 and 0.19, respectively, when the system is tested in the outdoor environment. Furthermore, the indoor recognition accuracy can be increased to 86.1% using the proposed fusion scheme. The experiments have verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed system. Restated, the contribution of this work is to develop a novel intelligent porch system incorporating a natural and unobtrusive method for identity recognition. The proposed system has been installed and tested in a real-world environment in the Technologies for Ubiquitous Computing and Humanity (TOUCH) Center at National Cheng Kung University.