Cross-dataset activity recognition via adaptive spatial-temporal transfer learning

Human activity recognition (HAR) aims at recognizing activities by training models on the large quantity of sensor data. Since it is time-consuming and expensive to acquire abundant labeled data, transfer learning becomes necessary for HAR by transferring knowledge from existing domains. However, there are two challenges existing in cross-dataset activity recognition. The first challenge is source domain selection. Given a target task and several available source domains, it is difficult to determine how to select the most similar source domain to the target domain such that negative transfer can be avoided. The second one is accurately activity transfer. After source domain selection, how to achieve accurate knowledge transfer between the selected source and the target domain remains another challenge. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Transfer Learning (ASTTL) approach to tackle both of the above two challenges in cross-dataset HAR. ASTTL learns the spatial features in transfer learning by adaptively evaluating the relative importance between the marginal and conditional probability distributions. Besides, it captures the temporal features via incremental manifold learning. Therefore, ASTTL can learn the adaptive spatial-temporal features for cross-dataset HAR and can be used for both source domain selection and accurate activity transfer. We evaluate the performance of ASTTL through extensive experiments on 4 public HAR datasets, which demonstrates its effectiveness. Furthermore, based on ASTTL, we design and implement an adaptive cross-dataset HAR system called Client-Cloud Collaborative Adaptive Activity Recognition System (3C2ARS) to perform HAR in the real environment. By collecting activities in the smartphone and transferring knowledge in the cloud server, ASTTL can significantly improve the performance of source domain selection and accurate activity transfer. Copyright © 2019 held by the owner/author(s).