Energy-efficient and Privacy-aware Social Distance Monitoring with Low-resolution Infrared Sensors and Adaptive Inference

Low-resolution infrared (IR) Sensors combined with machine learning (ML) can be leveraged to implement privacy-preserving social distance monitoring solutions in indoor spaces. However, the need of executing these applications on Internet of Things (IoT) edge nodes makes energy consumption critical. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient adaptive inference solution consisting of the cascade of a simple wake-up trigger and a 8-bit quantized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is only invoked for difficult-to-classify frames. Deploying such adaptive system on a IoT Microcontroller, we show that, when processing the output of a 8x8 low-resolution IR sensor, we are able to reduce the energy consumption by 37-57% with respect to a static CNN-based approach, with an accuracy drop of less than 2% (83% balanced accuracy).