Continuous Human Activity Recognition through Parallelism LSTM with Multi-Frequency Spectrograms

Abstract

According to the real-living environment, radar-based human activity recognition (HAR) is dedicated to recognizing and classifying a sequence of activities rather than individual activities, thereby drawing more attention in practical applications of security surveillance, health care and human–computer interactions. This paper proposes a parallelism long short-term memory (LSTM) framework with the input of multi-frequency spectrograms to implement continuous HAR. Specifically, frequency-division short-time Fourier transformation (STFT) is performed on the data stream of continuous activities collected by a stepped-frequency continuous-wave (SFCW) radar, generating spectrograms of multiple frequencies which introduce different scattering properties and frequency resolutions. In the designed parallelism LSTM framework, multiple parallel LSTM sub-networks are trained separately to extract different temporal features from the spectrogram of each frequency and produce corresponding classification probabilities. At the decision level, the probabilities of activity classification from these sub-networks are fused by addition as the recognition output. To validate the proposed method, an experimental data set is collected by using an SFCW radar to monitor 11 participants who continuously perform six activities in sequence with three different transitions and random durations. The validation results demonstrate that the average accuracies of the designed parallelism unidirectional LSTM (Uni-LSTM) and bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) based on five frequency spectrograms are 85.41% and 96.15%, respectively, outperforming traditional Uni-LSTM and Bi-LSTM networks with only a single-frequency spectrogram by 5.35% and 6.33% at least. Additionally, the recognition accuracy of the parallelism LSTM network reveals an upward trend as the number of multi-frequency spectrograms (namely the number of LSTM subnetworks) increases, and tends to be stable when the number reaches 4.