HIT HAR: Human Image Threshing Machine for Human Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning Models

Abstract

In recent days, research in human activity recognition (HAR) has played a significant role in healthcare systems. The accurate activity classification results from the HAR enhance the performance of the healthcare system with broad applications. HAR results are useful in monitoring a person’s health, and the system predicts abnormal activities based on user movements. The HAR system’s abnormal activity predictions provide better healthcare monitoring and reduce users’ health issues. The conventional HAR systems use wearable sensors, such as inertial measurement unit (IMU) and stretch sensors for activity recognition. These approaches show remarkable performances to the user’s basic activities such as sitting, standing, and walking. However, when the user performs complex activities, such as running, jumping, and lying, the sensor-based HAR systems have a higher degree of misclassification results due to the reading errors from sensors. These sensor errors reduce the overall performance of the HAR system with the worst classification results. Similarly, radiofrequency or vision-based HAR systems are not free from classification errors when used in real time. In this paper, we address some of the existing challenges of HAR systems by proposing a human image threshing (HIT) machine-based HAR system that uses an image dataset from a smartphone camera for activity recognition. The HIT machine effectively uses a mask region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) for human body detection, a facial image threshing machine (FIT) for image cropping and resizing, and a deep learning model for activity classification. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed HIT machine-based HAR system through extensive experiments and results. The proposed HIT machine achieved 98.53% accuracy when the ResNet architecture was used as its deep learning model.