Activity Graph Based Convolutional Neural Network for Human Activity Recognition Using Acceleration and Gyroscope Data

Human activity recognition (HAR) using smartphone sensors have been recently studied in various applications including healthcare, fitness, and smart home. Their recognition accuracy often depends on high-quality feature design and effectiveness of classification algorithms, where existing work mostly replies on laborious hand-crafted design and shallow feature learning architecture. Recent deep learning techniques demonstrate outstanding effectiveness in performing automatic feature learning and outperform traditional models in terms of accuracy. But their performance is limited by the quality and volumes of available labelled data. It is challenging to achieve accurate multisubject HAR with only smartphone sensing data. This article proposes a novel optimal activity graph generation model incorporating a deep learning framework for automatic and accurate HAR with multiple subjects using only acceleration and gyroscope data. The activity graph generation model presents a multisensory integration mechanism with three-steps sorting algorithms for producing optimal activity graphs containing alignments of neighbored signals in their width and height. Then, we propose a deep convolutional neural network to automatically learn distinguishable features from the graphs for HAR. By leveraging superior presentation of correlations between human activities and neighbored signals alignments via optimal activity graphs, the learned features are endowed with more discriminative power. The experimental evaluation was carried out on several benchmark datasets (i.e., UCI, USCHAD, and UTD-MHAD). The results showed that our approach improved the average recognition accuracy by about 5% when compared with other state-of-the-art HAR methods. Particularly towards multisubject HAR cases (UTD-MHAD dataset with 21 subjects), it achieved up to 10% accuracy gain over other methods. These improvements show the advantage and potential of our method dealing with complex HAR problems with multiple subjects using limited sensing data.