Deep Learning for Recognizing Human Activities Using Motions of Skeletal Joints

With advances in consumer electronics, demands have increased for greater granularity in differentiating and analyzing human daily activities. Moreover, the potential of machine learning, and especially deep learning, has become apparent as research proceeds in applications, such as monitoring the elderly, and surveillance for detection of suspicious people and objects left in public places. Although some techniques have been developed for human action recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors, these devices can place unnecessary mental and physical discomfort on people, especially children and the elderly. Therefore, research has focused on image-based HAR, placing it on the front line of developments in consumer electronics. This paper proposes an intelligent HAR system which can automatically recognize the human daily activities from depth sensors using human skeleton information, combining the techniques of image processing and deep learning. Moreover, due to low computational cost and high accuracy outcomes, an approach using skeleton information has proven very promising, and can be utilized without any restrictions on environments or domain structures. Therefore, this paper discusses the development of an effective skeleton information-based HAR which can be used as an embedded system. The experiments are performed using two famous public datasets of human daily activities. According to the experimental results, the proposed system outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.