An unsupervised approach to activity recognition and segmentation based on object-use fingerprints

Human activity recognition is an important task which has many potential applications. In recent years, researchers from pervasive computing are interested in deploying on-body sensors to collect observations and applying machine learning techniques to model and recognize activities. Supervised machine learning techniques typically require an appropriate training process in which training data need to be labeled manually. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach based on object-use fingerprints to recognize activities without human labeling. We show how to build our activity models based on object-use fingerprints, which are sets of contrast patterns describing significant differences of object use between any two activity classes. We then propose a fingerprint-based algorithm to recognize activities. We also propose two heuristic algorithms based on object relevance to segment a trace and detect the boundary of any two adjacent activities. We develop a wearable RFID system and conduct a real-world trace collection done by seven volunteers in a smart home over a period of 2 weeks. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations and comparison study. The results show that our recognition algorithm achieves a precision of 91.4% and a recall 92.8%, and the segmentation algorithm achieves an accuracy of 93.1% on the dataset we collected. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.