Human activity recognition (HAR) from wearable sensor data has recently gained widespread adoption in a number of fields. However, recognizing complex human activities, postural and rhythmic body movements (e.g., dance, sports) is challenging due to the lack of domain-specific labeling information, the perpetual variability in human movement kinematics profiles due to age, sex, dexterity and the level of professional training. In this paper, we propose a deep activity recognition model to work with limited labeled data, both for simple and complex human activities. To mitigate the intra- and inter-user spatio-temporal variability of movements, we posit novel data augmentation and domain normalization techniques. We depict a semi-supervised technique that learns noise and transformation invariant feature representation from sparsely labeled data to accommodate intra-personal and inter-user variations of human movement kinematics. We also postulate a transfer learning approach to learn domain invariant feature representations by minimizing the feature distribution distance between the source and target domains. We showcase the improved performance of our proposed framework, AugToAct, using a public HAR dataset. We also design our own data collection, annotation and experimental setup on complex dance activity recognition steps and kinematics movements where we achieved higher performance metrics with limited label data comparedmore »
Wearable activity recognition for robust human-robot teaming in safety-critical environments via hybrid neural networks
In this work, we present a novel non-visual HAR system that achieves state-of-the-art performance on realistic SCE tasks via a single wearable sensor. We leverage surface electromyography and inertial data from a low-profile wearable sensor to attain performant robot perception while remaining unobtrusive and user-friendly. By capturing both convolutional and temporal features with a hybrid CNN-LSTM classifier, our system is able to robustly and effectively classify complex, full-body human activities with only this single sensor. We perform a rigorous analysis of our method on two datasets representative of SCE tasks, and compare performance with several prominent HAR algorithms. Results show our system substantially outperforms rival algorithms in identifying complex human tasks from minimal sensing hardware, achieving F1-scores up to 84% over 31 strenuous activity classes. To our knowledge, we are the first to robustly identify complex full-body tasks using a single, unobtrusive sensor feasible for real-world use in SCEs. Using our approach, robots will be able to more reliably understand human activity, enabling them to safely navigate sensitive, crowded spaces.
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10145261
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 449 to 454
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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