High accuracy event detection for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Abstract

This paper proposes a new event detection algorithm for the use in Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). This latter is a field where the main concern is to break down, in a non-intrusive manner, the global electrical energy consumption into individual appliances consumption. Detecting events is thus of importance for appliance clustering in event-based NILM systems. A simple and fast algorithm that detects the variations of the signal's envelope is proposed in this paper. Its main advantage is the high localization accuracy of the start times of events. Its performance is evaluated using simulated and real data and is compared to one of the recently proposed algorithms in the field. Simulations show that the proposed detection algorithm gives 100 % precision and 97.13 % recall at a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 50 dB.