Learning deep and shallow features for human activity recognition.

selfBACK is an mHealth decision support system used by patients for the self-management of Lower Back Pain. It uses Human Activity Recognition from wearable sensors to monitor user activity in order to measure their adherence to prescribed physical activity plans. Different feature representation approaches have been proposed for Human Activity Recognition, including shallow, such as with hand-crafted time domain features and frequency transformation features; or, more recently, deep with Convolutional Neural Net approaches. The different approaches have produced mixed results in previous work and a clear winner has not been identified. This is especially the case for wrist mounted accelerometer sensors which are more susceptible to random noise compared to data from sensors mounted at other body locations e.g. thigh, waist or lower back. In this paper, we compare 7 different feature representation approaches on accelerometer data collected from both the wrist and the thigh. In particular, we evaluate a Convolutional Neural Net hybrid approach that has been shown to be effective on image retrieval but not previously applied to Human Activity Recognition. Results show the hybrid approach is effective, producing the best results compared to both hand-crafted and frequency domain feature representations by a margin of over 1.4% on the wrist

Learning deep features for kNN-based human activity recognition.

A CBR approach to Human Activity Recognition (HAR) uses the kNN algorithm to classify sensor data into different activity classes. Different feature representation approaches have been proposed for sensor data for the purpose of HAR. These include shallow features, which can either be hand-crafted from the time and frequency domains, or the coefficients of frequency transformations. Alternatively, deep features can be extracted using deep learning approches. These different representation approaches have been compared in previous works without a consistent best approach being identified. In this paper, we explore the question of which representation approach is best for kNN. Accordingly, we compare 5 different feature representation approaches (ranging from shallow to deep) on accelerometer data collected from two body locations, wrist and thigh. Results show deep features to produce the best results for kNN, compared to both hand-crafted and frequency transform, by a margin of up to 6.5% on the wrist and over 2.2% on the thigh. In addition, kNN produces very good results with as little as a single epoch of training for the deep features

When Kernel Methods meet Feature Learning: Log-Covariance Network for Action Recognition from Skeletal Data

Human action recognition from skeletal data is a hot research topic and important in many open domain applications of computer vision, thanks to recently introduced 3D sensors. In the literature, naive methods simply transfer off-the-shelf techniques from video to the skeletal representation. However, the current state-of-the-art is contended between to different paradigms: kernel-based methods and feature learning with (recurrent) neural networks. Both approaches show strong performances, yet they exhibit heavy, but complementary, drawbacks. Motivated by this fact, our work aims at combining together the best of the two paradigms, by proposing an approach where a shallow network is fed with a covariance representation. Our intuition is that, as long as the dynamics is effectively modeled, there is no need for the classification network to be deep nor recurrent in order to score favorably. We validate this hypothesis in a broad experimental analysis over 6 publicly available datasets.Comment: 2017 IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshop