A single feature for human activity recognition using two-dimensional acoustic array

Abstract

Human activity recognition is widely used in many fields, such as the monitoring of smart homes, fire detecting and rescuing, hospital patient management, etc. Acoustic waves are an effective method for human activity recognition. In traditional ways, one or a few ultrasonic sensors are used to receive signals, which require many feature quantities of extraction from the received data to improve recognition accuracy. In this study, we propose an approach for human activity recognition based on a two-dimensional acoustic array and convolutional neural networks. A single feature quantity is utilized to characterize the sound of human activities and identify those activities. The results show that the total accuracy of the activities is 97.5% for time-domain data and 100% for frequency-domain data. The influence of the array size on recognition accuracy is discussed, and the accuracy of the proposed approach is compared with traditional recognition approaches such as k-nearest neighbor and support vector machines where it outperformed them.