Fall detection systems can play an important role in assuring safe independent living for vulnerable people. These sensors not only have to detect falls but also have to recognize uncritical, normal activities of daily living in order to differentiate them from falls. Radar sensors are very attractive for human activity recognition thanks to their contactless capabilities and lack of plain videos recorded. In this article, a novel approach to recognize single activities in a continuous stream of radar data is proposed, whereby the stream is divided into windows of fixed length and, then, multilabel classification is used to recognize all activities taking place in these time segments. While the initial feasibility of this approach was presented in an earlier contribution presented at the 2023 IEEE SENSORS conference, in this extended work, additional in-depth studies on critical parameters are performed. Specifically, multiple combinations of different radar data domains/representations (e.g., range-time maps, range-Doppler maps, and spectrograms) and different radar nodes in a network of five cooperating sensors are considered as inputs to two considered multilabel classification networks. In addition, a parametric study on the probability thresholds of the networks to assign labels to specific classes is also performed.

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Radar-based human activity recognition in crowded environments using regression approaches is addressed. Whereas previous research has focused on single activities and subjects, the problem of continuous activity recognition involving up to five individuals moving in arbitrary directions in an indoor area is introduced. To treat the problem, a regression-based approach is used, which offers innovative insights into creating robust and accurate systems for monitoring human activities.Novel approaches utilizing LSTM or CNN regression techniques with Linear Regression and Support Vector Machine regressor are compared on extracted features from radar data through the Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Principal Component Analysis. These approaches are rigorously evaluated by a Leave-One-Group-Out method, with performance assessed using common regression metrics such as the RMSE. The most promising outcomes were observed for crowds of three and five individuals, with respective RMSE of approximately 0.4 and 0.6. These results were primarily achieved by utilizing the micro-Doppler (µD) Spectrogram or range-Doppler data domain.@en

This paper presents a novel approach to radar-based human activity recognition in continuous data streams. To date, most work in this research area has aimed at either classifying every single time step separately by means of recurrent neural networks, or using a two-step procedure of first segmenting the stream into single activities and then classifying the segment. The first approach is restricted to time-dependent data as input; the second approach depends crucially on the segmentation step. To overcome these issues we propose a new approach in which we first segment the stream into windows of fixed length and subsequently classify each segment. Since due to the fixed length, the segment is not restricted to one activity alone, we use a multi-label classification approach, which can account for multiple activities taking place in the same segment by giving multiple outputs. To obtain a higher classification accuracy we fuse several radar data representations, namely range-time, range-Doppler and spectrogram. Using a publicly available dataset, an overall classification accuracy of 95.8% and F1 score of 92.08% could be achieved with the proposed method.

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