This paper proposes a multi-level feature learning framework for human action recognition using body-worn inertial sensors. The framework consists of three phases, respectively designed to analyze signal-based (low-level), components (mid-level) and semantic (high-level) information. Low-level features, extracted from raw signals, capture the time and frequency domain property while mid-level representations, obtained through the dictionary learning method, learn the composition of the action. The Max-margin Latent Pattern Learning (MLPL) method is proposed and implemented on the concatenation of low- and mid-level features to learn high-level semantic descriptions of latent action patterns as the output of our framework. Various experiments on Opp, Skoda and WISDM datasets show that the semantic feature learned by this framework possesses higher representation ability than low- and mid-level features. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances.
@cite_64: 
@cite_28: Feature extraction for activity recognition in context-aware ubiquitous computing applications is usually a heuristic process, informed by underlying domain knowledge. Relying on such explicit knowledge is problematic when aiming to generalize across different application domains. We investigate the potential of recent machine learning methods for discovering universal features for context-aware applications of activity recognition. We also describe an alternative data representation based on the empirical cumulative distribution function of the raw data, which effectively abstracts from absolute values. Experiments on accelerometer data from four publicly available activity recognition datasets demonstrate the significant potential of our approach to address both contemporary activity recognition tasks and next generation problems such as skill assessment and the detection of novel activities.
@cite_56: Activity recognition fits within the bigger framework of context awareness. In this paper, we report on our efforts to recognize user activity from accelerometer data. Activity recognition is formulated as a classification problem. Performance of base-level classifiers and meta-level classifiers is compared. Plurality Voting is found to perform consistently well across different settings.
@cite_43: In this paper, the autoregressive (AR) model of time-series is presented to recognize human activity from a tri-axial accelerometer data. Four orders of autoregressive model for accelerometer data is built and the AR coefficients are extracted as features for activity recognition. Classification of the human activities is performed with support vector machine (SVM). The average recognition results for four activities (running, still, jumping and walking) using the proposed AR-based features are 92.25 , which are better than using traditional frequently used time domains features (mean, standard deviation, energy and correlation of acceleration data) and FFT features. The results show that AR coefficients obvious discriminate different human activities and it can be extract as an effective feature for the recognition of accelerometer date.
@cite_40: A new technique for classifying patterns of movement via electromyographic (EMG) signals is presented. Two methods (conventional autoregressive (AR) coefficients and cepstral coefficients) for extracting features from EMG signals and three classification algorithms (Euclidean Distance Measure (EDM), Weighted Distance Measure (WDM), and Maximum Likelihood Method (MLM)) for discriminating signals representative of broad classes of movements are described and compared. These three classifiers are derived from Bayes classifier with some assumptions, the relationship among them is discussed. The conventional MLM is modified to avoid heavy matrix inversion. Six able-bodied subjects with two pairs of surface electrodes located on bilateral sternocleidomastoid and upper trapezius muscles were studied in the experiment. The EMG signals of 20 repetitions of 10 motions were analyzed for each subject. Experimental results showed that mean recognition rate of the cepstral coefficients was at least 5 superior to that of the AR coefficients. The improvement achieved by the cepstral method was statistically significant for all the three classifiers. Reasons for the superiority of cepstral features were investigated from the feature space and frequency domain, respectively. The cepstral coefficients owned better cluster separability in feature space and they emphasized the more informative part in the frequency domain. The discrimination rate of the MLM was the highest among three classifiers. Incorporation of the cepstral features with the MLM could reduce the misclassification rate by 10.6 when compared with the combination of AR coefficients and EDM. Proper choice of five of ten motions could further raise the recognition rate to more than 95 . >
@cite_16: This paper developed a high-accuracy human activity recognition system based on single tri-axis accelerometer for use in a naturalistic environment. This system exploits the discrete cosine transform (DCT), the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification human different activity. First, the effective features are extracted from accelerometer data using DCT. Next, feature dimension is reduced by PCA in DCT domain. After implementing the PCA, the most invariant and discriminating information for recognition is maintained. As a consequence, Multi-class Support Vector Machines is adopted to distinguish different human activities. Experiment results show that the proposed system achieves the best accuracy is 97.51 , which is better than other approaches.
@cite_12: In this work, algorithms are developed and evaluated to de- tect physical activities from data acquired using five small biaxial ac- celerometers worn simultaneously on different parts of the body. Ac- celeration data was collected from 20 subjects without researcher su- pervision or observation. Subjects were asked to perform a sequence of everyday tasks but not told specifically where or how to do them. Mean, energy, frequency-domain entropy, and correlation of acceleration data was calculated and several classifiers using these features were tested. De- cision tree classifiers showed the best performance recognizing everyday activities with an overall accuracy rate of 84 . The results show that although some activities are recognized well with subject-independent training data, others appear to require subject-specific training data. The results suggest that multiple accelerometers aid in recognition because conjunctions in acceleration feature values can effectively discriminate many activities. With just two biaxial accelerometers - thigh and wrist - the recognition performance dropped only slightly. This is the first work to investigate performance of recognition algorithms with multiple, wire-free accelerometers on 20 activities using datasets annotated by the subjects themselves.
@cite_11: The majority of activity recognition systems in wearable computing rely on a set of statistical measures, such as means and moments, extracted from short frames of continuous sensor measurements to perform recognition. These features implicitly quantify the distribution of data observed in each frame. However, feature selection remains challenging and labour intensive, rendering a more generic method to quantify distributions in accelerometer data much desired. In this paper we present the ECDF representation, a novel approach to preserve characteristics of arbitrary distributions for feature extraction, which is particularly suitable for embedded applications. In extensive experiments on six publicly available datasets we demonstrate that it outperforms common approaches to feature extraction across a wide variety of tasks.
Low-level features are designed to capture signal-based information. Statistical metrics are the most common approaches, which include mean, variance, standard deviation, energy, entropy and correlation coefficients @cite_12 @cite_56 . Fourier Transform (FT), Wavelet Transform (WT) @cite_64 , Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) @cite_16 as well as auto-regressive (AR) coefficients @cite_43 are also commonly applied in HAR tasks for their promising performances. @cite_40 analyzed electromyography (EMG) signals by extracting conventional auto-regressive coefficients and cepstral coefficients as features. @cite_11 designed the hand-crafted feature based on the Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function (ECDF) to preserve characteristics of inertial signal distribution. Pl "o @cite_28 improved on that work and proposed the ECDF-PCA feature. They implemented the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method on signals normalized by ECDF and significantly improved performance. In this paper, statistical values, FFT coefficients and ECDF-PCA are calculated as low-level features to demonstrate the generalization ability of the proposed framework.