Multimodal Sensing and Lighting Estimation for PoE-Enabled Intelligent and Energy-Efficient Lighting Networks

The application of power over Ethernet (PoE)-enabled lighting has emerged as a groundbreaking technology with the potential to achieve cooperative control and create an energy-saving lighting network. However, fine-grained user-side lighting environment perception is crucial to improve energy efficiency and user experience. To tackle this issue, a PoE-enabled intelligent lighting network with multi-modal sensing is proposed. Specifically, a multi-modal sensor is designed and installed on the side of the luminaire to provide both fine-grained lighting environment monitor and dimming. Then, a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based estimation scheme is proposed to estimate the illumination and color temperature information around the user activity area. Moreover, an experimental lighting network is constructed and deployed in a classroom to measure practical lighting dataset. The proposed scheme effectively estimates the lighting quality on the user side based on the measurement data. Furthermore, based on the estimated information and the collaborative control capabilities of PoE, the operating current of the luminaire is updated in real time, and thus the ambient light resource is fully utilized. Finally, the proposed lighting network achieves a 39.99% energy saving.