Deep Dynamic Neural Networks for Multimodal Gesture Segmentation and Recognition

This paper describes a novel method called Deep Dynamic Neural Networks (DDNN) for multimodal gesture recognition. A semi-supervised hierarchical dynamic framework based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed for simultaneous gesture segmentation and recognition where skeleton joint information, depth and RGB images, are the multimodal input observations. Unlike most traditional approaches that rely on the construction of complex handcrafted features, our approach learns high-level spatiotemporal representations using deep neural networks suited to the input modality: a Gaussian-Bernouilli Deep Belief Network (DBN) to handle skeletal dynamics, and a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN) to manage and fuse batches of depth and RGB images. This is achieved through the modeling and learning of the emission probabilities of the HMM required to infer the gesture sequence. This purely data driven approach achieves a Jaccard index score of 0.81 in the ChaLearn LAP gesture spotting challenge. The performance is on par with a variety of state-of-the-art hand-tuned feature-based approaches and other learning-based methods, therefore opening the door to the use of deep learning techniques in order to further explore multimodal time series data

Deep convolutional and LSTM recurrent neural networks for multimodal wearable activity recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) tasks have traditionally been solved using engineered features obtained by heuristic processes. Current research suggests that deep convolutional neural networks are suited to automate feature extraction from raw sensor inputs. However, human activities are made of complex sequences of motor movements, and capturing this temporal dynamics is fundamental for successful HAR. Based on the recent success of recurrent neural networks for time series domains, we propose a generic deep framework for activity recognition based on convolutional and LSTM recurrent units, which: (i) is suitable for multimodal wearable sensors; (ii) can perform sensor fusion naturally; (iii) does not require expert knowledge in designing features; and (iv) explicitly models the temporal dynamics of feature activations. We evaluate our framework on two datasets, one of which has been used in a public activity recognition challenge. Our results show that our framework outperforms competing deep non-recurrent networks on the challenge dataset by 4% on average; outperforming some of the previous reported results by up to 9%. Our results show that the framework can be applied to homogeneous sensor modalities, but can also fuse multimodal sensors to improve performance. We characterise key architectural hyperparameters’ influence on performance to provide insights about their optimisation