Semisupervised Human Activity Recognition With Radar Micro-Doppler Signatures

Human activity recognition (HAR) plays a vital role in many applications, such as surveillance, in-home monitoring, and health care. Portable radar sensor has been increasingly used in HAR systems in combination with deep learning (DL). However, it is both difficult and time-consuming to obtain a large-scale radar dataset with reliable labels. Insufficient labeled data often limit the generalization of DL models. As a result, the performance of DL models will drop when being applied to a new scenario. In this sense, only labeling a small portion of data in the large-scale radar dataset is more feasible. In this article, we propose a semisupervised transfer learning (TL) algorithm, “
joint domain and semantic transfer learning
(
JDS-TL
),” for radar-based HAR, which is composed of two modules: unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) and supervised semantic transfer. By employing a sparsely labeled dataset to train the HAR model, the proposed method alleviates the need of labeling a significantly large number of radar signals. We adopt a public radar micro-Doppler spectrogram dataset including six human activities to evaluate
JDS-TL
. Experiments show that the proposed
JDS-TL
is able to recognize the six activities with an average accuracy of 87.6% when there are only 10% instances labeled in the training dataset. Ablation analysis also demonstrates the efficiency of the DA and the semantic transfer modules.