State of the art of smart homes

In this paper we present a review of the state of the art of smart homes. We will first look at the research work related to smart homes from various view points; first in the view point of specific techniques such as smart homes that utilize computer vision based techniques, smart homes that utilize audio-based techniques and then smart homes that utilize multimodal techniques. Then we look at it from the view point of specific applications of smart homes such as eldercare and childcare applications, energy efficiency applications and finally in the research directions of multimedia retrieval for ubiquitous environments. We will summarize the smart homes based research into these two categories. In the survey we found out that some well-known smart home applications like video based security applications has seen the maturity in terms of new research directions while some topics like smart homes for energy efficiency and video summarization are gaining momentum. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.