Unsupervised feature learning for human activity recognition using smartphone sensors

Abstract

Feature representation has a significant impact on human activity recognition. While the common used hand-crafted features rely heavily on the specific domain knowledge and may suffer from nonadaptability to the particular dataset. To alleviate the problems of handcrafted features, we present a feature extraction framework which exploits different unsupervised feature learning techniques to learning useful feature representation from accelerometer and gyroscope sensor data for human activity recognition. The unsupervised learning techniques we investigate include sparse auto-encoder, denoising auto-encoder and PCA.We evaluate the performance on a public human activity recognition dataset and also compare our method with traditional features and another way of unsupervised feature learning. The results show that the learned features of our framework outperform the other two methods. The sparse auto-encoder achieves better results than other two techniques within our framework.