Human activity recognition using 2D skeleton data and supervised machine learning

Vision-based human activity recognition (HAR) finds its application in many fields such as video surveillance, robot navigation, telecare and ambient intelligence. Most of the latest researches in the field of automated HAR based on skeleton data use depth devices such as Kinect to obtain three-dimensional (3D) skeleton information directly from the camera. Although these researches achieve high accuracy but are strictly device dependent and cannot be used for videos other than from specific cameras. Current work focuses on the use of only 2D skeletal data, extracted from videos obtained through any standard camera, for activity recognition. Appearance and motion features were extracted using 2D positions of human skeletal joints through OpenPose library. The approach was trained and tested on publically available datasets. Supervised machine learning was implemented for recognising four activity classes including sit, stand, walk and fall. Performance of five techniques including K-nearest neighbours (KNNs), support vector machine, Naive Bayes, linear discriminant and feed-forward back-propagation neural network was compared to find the best classifier for the proposed method. All techniques performed well with best results obtained through the KNN classifier.