Detection and recognition of indoor smoking events

Smoking in public indoor spaces has become prohibited in many countries since it not only affects the health of the people around you, but also increases the risk of fire outbreaks. This paper proposes a novel scheme to automatically detect and recognize smoking events by using exsiting surveillance cameras. The main idea of our proposed method is to detect human smoking events by recognizing their actions. In this scheme, the human pose estimation is introduced to analyze human actions from their poses. The human pose estimation method segments head and both hands from human body parts by using a skin color detection method. However, the skin color methods may fail in insufficient light conditions. Therefore, the lighting compensation is applied to help the skin color detection method become more accurate. Due to the human body parts may be covered by shadows, which may cause the human pose estimation to fail, the Kalman filter is applied to track the missed body parts. After that, we evaluate the probability features of hands approaching the head. The support vector machine (SVM) is applied to learn and recognize the smoking events by the probability features. To analysis the performance of proposed method, the datasets established in the survillance camera view under indoor enviroment are tested. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method with accuracy rate of 83.33%.