Performance analysis of triaxial accelerometer for activity recognition

Human activity recognition is one of the most challenging research areas in human-machine interaction. Activity recognition by wearable sensors produces significant information about a person's functional ability and lifestyle. In this paper, we present an inertial sensors-based approach for activity and postural transition recognition. Efficient features are extracted from the sensor data. Then, the features are normalized using Z-score followed by Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA) to make them more robust. Finally, the features are trained with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for activity and postural transition recognition. The proposed method recognizes 12 activities with an overall accuracy of 97%. In the activity recognition system, the multimodal input data is collected from only one accelerometer and one gyroscope sensor embedded in the user's smartphone. The proposed system can contribute in research fields such as human-robot interaction for practical applications such as eldercare in smart homes.

Adaptive Bayesian inference system for recognition of walking activities and prediction of gait events using wearable sensors

Video-based human action recognition is one of the most important and challenging areas of research in the field of computer vision. Human action recognition has found many pragmatic applications in video surveillance, human-computer interaction, entertainment, autonomous driving, etc. Owing to the recent development of deep learning methods for human action recognition, the performance of action recognition has significantly enhanced for challenging datasets. Deep learning techniques are mainly used for recognizing actions in images and videos comprising of Euclidean data. A recent development in deep learning methods is the extension of these techniques to non-Euclidean data or graph data with many nodes and edges. Human body skeleton resembles a graph, therefore, the graph convolutional network (GCN) is applicable to the non-Euclidean body skeleton. In the past few years, GCN has emerged as an important tool for skeleton-based action recognition. Therefore, we conduct a survey using GCN methods for action recognition. Herein, we present a comprehensive overview of recent GCN techniques for action recognition, propose a taxonomy for the categorization of GCN techniques for action recognition, carry out a detailed study of the benchmark datasets, enlist relevant resources and open-source codes, and finally provide an outline for future research directions and trends. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first survey for action recognition using GCN techniques.

Video and image analysis technologies have made human action recognition as an interesting field and used in many practical application systems such as visual surveillance systems, healthcare monitoring systems, 3D games and smart home. In this paper, we address the challenges of automatic tracking, detection and recognition of three-dimensional human pose-based actions from sequences of depth maps. Specifically, we have designed our proposed idea into a probabilistic framework: 1) dividing each action into meaningful ordered temporal segments, 2) using pixel-neighboring intensity difference approach to identify human shape region from the confused scenes, 3) introducing a robust spatiotemporal features to extract 3D joints information via local distance features and depth human shape information to get motion variation features and 4) finally these sets of features are merged together and their feature vectors are further reduced and discriminated to get optimal vectors for real-world applications. Next, the augmented features are enhanced and symbolized by Linde-Buzo-Gray clustering algorithm for better action recognition. With these symbols, each action hidden Markov model (HMM) is trained and tested for action recognition. The experimental results demonstrated our proposed approach on three challenging depth video datasets: IM-DepthActions, MSRAction3D and MSRDailyActivity3D, producing significantly improved results over the state-of-the-art methods: especially for those actions that are not easily discernible by the existing methods.

IoT-FAR: A multi-sensor fusion approach for IoT-based firefighting activity recognition

Human action recognition has been a popular issue recently because it can be applied in many applications such as intelligent surveillance systems, human-robot interaction, and autonomous vehicle control. Human action recognition using RGB video is a challenging task because the learning of actions is easily affected by the cluttered background. To cope with this problem, the proposed method estimates 3D human poses first which can help remove the cluttered background and focus on the human body. In addition to the human poses, the proposed method also utilizes appearance features nearby the predicted joints to make our action prediction context-aware. Instead of using 3D convolutional neural networks as many action recognition approaches did, the proposed method uses a two-stream architecture that aggregates the results from skeleton-based and appearance-based approaches to do action recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D which is a large-scale dataset for human action recognition.

In recent years, it has been observed that many researchers have been working on different areas of detection, recognition and monitoring of human activities. The automatic determination of human physical activities is often referred to as human activity recognition (HAR). One of the most important technology that detects and tracks the activity of the human body is sensor-based HAR technology. In recent days, sensor-based HAR attracts attention in the field of computers due to its wide use in daily life and is a rapidly growing field of research. Activity recognition (AR) application is carried out by evaluating the signals obtained from various sensors placed in the human body. In this study, a new approach is proposed to extract features from sensor signals using HAR. The proposed approach is inspired by the Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) method, which is widely used in image processing, but it is applied to one-dimensional signals, unlike GLCM. Two datasets were used to test the proposed approach. The datasets were created from the signals obtained from the accelerometer, gyro and magnetometer sensors. Heralick features were obtained from co-occurrence matrix created after 1D-GLCM (One (1) Dimensional-Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix) was applied to the signals. HAR operation has been carried out for different scenarios using these features. Success rates of 96.66 and 93.88% were obtained for two datasets, respectively. It has been observed that the new approach proposed within the scope of the study provides high success rates for HAR applications. It is thought that the proposed approach can be used in the classification of different signals.

Human activity recognition in unconstrained RGB--D videos has extensive applications in surveillance, multimedia data analytics, human-computer interaction, etc, but remains a challenging problem due to the background clutter, camera motion, viewpoint changes, etc. We develop a novel RGB--D activity recognition approach that leverages the dense trajectory feature in RGB videos. By mapping the 2D positions of the dense trajectories from RGB video to the corresponding positions in the depth video, we can recover the 3D trajectory of the tracked interest points, which captures important motion information along the depth direction. To characterize the 3D trajectories, we apply motion boundary histogram (MBH) to depth direction and propose 3D trajectory shape descriptors. Our proposed 3D trajectory feature is a good complementary to dense trajectory feature extracted from RGB video only. The performance evaluation on a challenging unconstrained RGB--D activity recognition dataset, i.e., Hollywood 3D, shows that our proposed method outperforms the baseline methods (STIP-based) significantly, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Human detection and action recognition form the basis for understanding human behaviors. Human detection is used to detect the positions of humans, and action recognition is able to recognize the action of specific humans. However, numerous approaches have been used to handle action recognition and human detection separately. Therefore, three main issues still exist when independent methods of human detection and action recognition are combined, 1) intrinsic errors in object detection impact the performance of action recognition, 2) features common to action recognition and object detection are missed, 3) the combination also has an impact on processing speed. We propose a single framework for human detection and action recognition to solve these issues. It is based on a hierarchical structure called Boosted Randomized Trees. The nodes are trained such that the upper nodes detect humans from the background, while the lower nodes recognize action. We were able to improve both human detection and action recognition rates over earlier hierarchical structure approaches with the proposed method.

Understanding semantic meaning of human actions captured in unconstrained environments has broad applications in fields ranging from patient monitoring, human-computer interaction, to surveillance systems. However, while great progresses have been achieved on automatic human action detection and recognition in videos that are captured in controlled/constrained environments, most existing approaches perform unsatisfactorily on videos with uncontrolled/unconstrained conditions (e.g., significant camera motion, background clutter, scaling, and light conditions). To address this issue, the authors propose a robust human action detection and recognition framework that works effectively on videos taken in controlled or uncontrolled environments. Specifically, the authors integrate the optical flow field and Harris3D corner detector to generate a new spatial-temporal information representation for each video sequence, from which the general Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is learned. All the mean vectors of the Gaussian components in the generated GMM model are concatenated to create the GMM supervector for video action recognition. They build a boosting classifier based on a set of sparse representation classifiers and hamming distance classifiers to improve the accuracy of action recognition. The experimental results on two broadly used public data sets, KTH and UCF YouTube Action, show that the proposed framework outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches on both action detection and recognition.

An automatic human action representation and recognition technique is proposed in this paper. Appearance-change problem due to human wearing dresses and body shapes is also investigated in this study for automatic human action recognition. A tuned eigenspace technique is proposed for automatic human posture and/or motion recognition that successfully overcome the preceding problems. We employ image pre-processing by Gaussian and Sobel edge filter, called the first stage tuning, for reducing a dress effect, and a mean eigenspace produced by taking a mean of the similar postures, called the second stage tuning, for avoiding the preceding problems. An eigenspace called a tuned eigenspace is obtained from the mentioned processes and it is used for further recognition of unfamiliar postures and actions. The proposed method is compared with a related technique and the robustness of this approach is presented.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become one of the most important research fields to achieve real-time monitoring of human activities for timely decision making in various applications like fall detection, elderly care etc. Now-a-days, most people use smartphones which come with various embedded inertial sensors like accelerometer and gyroscope to monitor acceleration and angular velocity. These smartphone-based sensors have proven to be cost-effective solution in identification of activities belonging to ADL (Activities of Daily Living). Various Machine Learning, Deep learning and hybrid models have been proposed and implemented for HAR. This paper also proposes various hybrid deep learning approaches which combine Deep Neural Networks with other models like LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) Model and GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) for effective classification of engineered features from CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) Model. A novel architecture that integrates CNN with Random Forest Classifier (DeepCNN-RF) is proposed to add randomness to the model. The proposed models have been tested on publicly available HAR Datasets like UCI HAR and WISDM Activity Recognition Datasets. Experimental results show that the hybrid models outperform the state-of-the-art data mining, machine learning techniques in UCI HAR and WISDM with an overall maximum accuracy of 97.77% and 98.2% respectively.

In this paper, we present a “key segment” mining approach for human action recognition. Our model is able to locate discriminative segments for action samples via multiple instance learning. Moreover, we propose a dynamic pooling approach to automatically find the optimal length of segment for each action sample. In addition, an effective feature is proposed for action recognition with 3D skeleton joints. It can effectively capture informative motion and shape cues of skeletons, and leads to a compact and discriminative representation. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed human action recognition method on two benchmark datasets (i.e., MSR Action3D and UCF-Kinect). Moreover, our method demonstrates superior accuracy than previous methods of using only skeleton data on MSR Action3D, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on UCF-Kinect.Keywordsaction recognitionmultiple instance learningskeleton featuredynamic pooling

This paper presents a new approach for human action recognition around sleeping with the human body parts locations and the positional relationship between human and sleeping environment. Body parts are estimated from the depth image obtained by a time-of-flight (TOF) sensor using oriented 3D normal vector. Issues in action recognition of sleeping situation are the demand of availability in darkness, and hiding of the human body by duvets. Therefore, the extraction of image features is difficult since color and edge features are obscured by covers. Thus, first in our method, positions of four parts of the body (head, torso, thigh, and lower leg) are estimated by using the shape model of bodily surface constructed by oriented 3D normal vector. This shape model can represent the surface shape of rough body, and is effective in robust posture estimation of the body hidden with duvets. Then, action descriptor is extracted from the position of each body part. The descriptor includes temporal variation of each part of the body and spatial vector of position of the parts and the bed. Furthermore, this paper proposes hierarchical action classes and classifiers to improve the indistinct action classification. Classifiers are composed of two layers, and recognize human action by using the action descriptor. First layer focuses on spatial descriptor and classifies action roughly. Second layer focuses on temporal descriptor and classifies action finely. This approach achieves a robust recognition of obscured human by using the posture information and the hierarchical action recognition.

A new framework for deep learning video based Human Action Recognition on the edge