Vehicular sensor data consists of multiple time-series arising from a number
of sensors. Using such multi-sensor data we would like to detect occurrences of
specific events that vehicles encounter, e.g., corresponding to particular
maneuvers that a vehicle makes or conditions that it encounters. Events are
characterized by similar waveform patterns re-appearing within one or more
sensors. Further such patterns can be of variable duration. In this work, we
propose a method for detecting such events in time-series data using a novel
feature descriptor motivated by similar ideas in image processing. We define
the shape histogram: a constant dimension descriptor that nevertheless captures
patterns of variable duration. We demonstrate the efficacy of using shape
histograms as features to detect events in an SVM-based, multi-sensor,
supervised learning scenario, i.e., multiple time-series are used to detect an
event. We present results on real-life vehicular sensor data and show that our
technique performs better than available pattern detection implementations on
our data, and that it can also be used to combine features from multiple
sensors resulting in better accuracy than using any single sensor. Since
previous work on pattern detection in time-series has been in the single series
context, we also present results using our technique on multiple standard
time-series datasets and show that it is the most versatile in terms of how it
ranks compared to other published results
