Accurate physical activity recognition using multidimensional features and markov model for smart health fitness

Abstract

Recent developments in sensor technologies enable physical activity recognition (PAR) as an essential tool for smart health monitoring and for fitness exercises. For efficient PAR, model representation and training are significant factors contributing to the ultimate success of recognition systems because model representation and accurate detection of body parts and physical activities cannot be distinguished if the system is not well trained. This paper provides a unified framework that explores multidimensional features with the help of a fusion of body part models and quadratic discriminant analysis which uses these features for markerless human pose estimation. Multilevel features are extracted as displacement parameters to work as spatiotemporal properties. These properties represent the respective positions of the body parts with respect to time. Finally, these features are processed by a maximum entropy Markov model as a recognition engine based on transition and emission probability values. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model produces more accurate results compared to the state-of-the-art methods for both body part detection and for physical activity recognition. The accuracy of the proposed method for body part detection is 90.91% on a University of Central Florida’s (UCF) sports action dataset and, for activity recognition on a UCF YouTube action dataset and an IM-Daily RGB Events dataset, accuracy is 89.09% and 88.26% respectively. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.