Ontology-based realtime activity monitoring using beam search

In this contribution we present a realtime activity monitoring system, called SCENIOR (SCEne Interpretation with Ontology-based Rules) with several innovative features. Activity concepts are defined in an ontology using OWL, extended by SWRL rules for the temporal structure, and are automatically transformed into a high-level scene interpretation system based on JESS rules. Interpretation goals are transformed into hierarchical hypotheses structures associated with constraints and embedded in a probabilistic scene model. The incremental interpretation process is organised as a Beam Search with multiple parallel interpretation threads. At each step, a context-dependent probabilistic rating is computed for each partial interpretation reflecting the probability of that interpretation to reach completion. Low-rated threads are discarded depending on the beam width. Fully instantiated hypotheses may be used as input for higher-level hypotheses, thus realising a doubly hierarchical recognition process. Missing evidence may be "hallucinated" depending on the context. The system has been evaluated with real-life data of aircraft service activities. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.