Identification of TV Channel Watching from Smart Meter Data Using Energy Disaggregation

TL;DR

This paper explores identifying TV channel content from household smart meter energy data by matching aggregated signals with reference signals, achieving high accuracy in content identification.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for disaggregating TV content from smart meter data using elastic matching algorithms, with the best accuracy of 93.6%.

Findings

Achieved 93.6% accuracy in TV channel identification.

Elastic matching algorithms effectively disaggregate TV signals.

Potential for non-intrusive content monitoring using smart meters.

Abstract

Smart meters are used to measure the energy consumption of households. Specifically, within the energy consumption task smart meter have been used for load forecasting, reduction of consumer bills as well as reduction of grid distortions. Except energy consumption smart meters can be used to disaggregate energy consumption on device level. In this paper we investigate the potential of identifying the multimedia content played by a TV or monitor device using the central house's smart meter measuring the aggregated energy consumption from all working appliances of the household. The proposed architecture is based on elastic matching of aggregated energy signal frames with 20 reference TV channel signals. Different elastic matching algorithms were used with the best achieved video content identification accuracy being 93.6% using the MVM algorithm.