Event Recognition in Sensor Networks by Means of Grammatical Inference

Modern military and civilian surveillance applications should provide end users with the high level representation of events observed by sensors rather than with the raw data measurements. Hence, there is a need for a system that can infer higher level meaning from collected sensor data. We demonstrate that probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs) can be used as a basis for such a system. To recognize events from raw sensor network measurements, we use a PCFG inference method based on Stolcke (1994) and Chen(1996). We present a fast algorithm for deriving a concise probabilistic context free grammar from the given observational data. The algorithm uses an evaluation metric based on Bayesian formula for maximizing grammar a posteriori probability given the training data. We also present a real-world scenario of monitoring a parking lot and the simulation based on this scenario. We described the use of PCFGs to recognize events in the results of such a simulation. We finally demonstrate the deployment details of such an event recognition system.