LCL: Light Contactless Low-delay Load Monitoring via Compressive Attentional Multi-label Learning

Fine-grained energy consumption analysis has great potential value in applications of Smart Grids, renewable energy, and Artificial Intelligence of Things. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is a single-sensor alternative to the conventional one-sensor-for-one-appliance solution due to its ability to deduce individual appliances states from mixed measurements from the main power interface. Despite its advantages of low cost and easy maintenance, a few drawbacks hinders its widespread adoption. To enhance the Quality of Service (QoS) of NILM, four objectives should be achieved by careful designing: high accuracy, user transparency, low response delay, and low data redundancy.Inspired by observations of discriminative yet redundant current waveform and model sparsity, we propose LCL, a lightweight, contactless, plug-and-play solution for real-time load monitoring. The filtering module skips over unchanged input and compresses the measurements of interest using Compressed Sensing. The reconstruction-free inference module runs an attentional multi-label classification and returns all functioning appliance states directly from the compressed input. The compression module leverages model sparsity for real-time processing on edge devices. Evaluations based on our prototype deployed in real-life scenarios attest to the high QoS of LCL with a subset accuracy of 94.2% and a delay reduction of 52.2%. Our solution further filters out 96.8% of the redundant input and attains a Measurement Rate of 0.1 without noticeable impact on the performance.