Gravity Control-Based Data Augmentation Technique for Improving VR User Activity Recognition

Abstract

The neural-network-based human activity recognition (HAR) technique is being increasingly used for activity recognition in virtual reality (VR) users. The major issue of a such technique is the collection large-scale training datasets which are key for deriving a robust recognition model. However, collecting large-scale data is a costly and time-consuming process. Furthermore, increasing the number of activities to be classified will require a much larger number of training datasets. Since training the model with a sparse dataset can only provide limited features to recognition models, it can cause problems such as overfitting and suboptimal results. In this paper, we present a data augmentation technique named gravity control-based augmentation (GCDA) to alleviate the sparse data problem by generating new training data based on the existing data. The benefits of the symmetrical structure of the data are that it increased the number of data while preserving the properties of the data. The core concept of GCDA is two-fold: (1) decomposing the acceleration data obtained from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) into zero-gravity acceleration and gravitational acceleration, and augmenting them separately, and (2) exploiting gravity as a directional feature and controlling it to augment training datasets. Through the comparative evaluations, we validated that the application of GCDA to training datasets showed a larger improvement in classification accuracy (96.39%) compared to the typical data augmentation methods (92.29%) applied and those that did not apply the augmentation method (85.21%).