Indoor Human Activity Recognition Based on Ambient Radar with Signal Processing and Machine Learning

Abstract

Indoor human activity recognition has been extensively investigated. However, most of the solutions require sensors e.g. 9-axis IMU be equipped on human body or use image processing that presents privacy issues. This work proposes an ambient radar sensor based a solution to recognize the activities that humans normally perform in indoor environments. This solution uses a 7.8 GHz radar to emit 16 pulse signals every second and samples the reflected signals at 128 KHz to capture the fine dynamics of human activities. This solution designs a set of data preprocessing algorithms, including a data refining algorithm to filter outlier data, a contrastive divergence algorithm to remove background static reflection, and a transformation algorithm to convert the signal data into feature- rich spatial location changes. This solution also develops schemes to separate a collection of various activities into individuals. A lowpass frequency filter is designed to remove unwanted noisy data and the motion intensity is used to classify the activities into two high-level groups. It uses a slope-based approach and a k- means clustering to further finely recognize each activity. This solution has been extensively evaluated in a spacious research lab room and shows outstanding accuracy.