A daily behavior enabled hidden Markov model for human behavior understanding

This paper presents a Hierarchical Context Hidden Markov Model (HC-HMM) for behavior understanding from video streams in a nursing center. The proposed HC-HMM infers elderly behaviors through three contexts which are spatial, activities, and temporal context. By considering the hierarchical architecture, HC-HMM builds three modules composing the three components, reasoning in the primary and the secondary relationship. The spatial contexts are defined from the spatial structure, so that it is placed as the primary inference contexts. The temporal duration is associated to elderly activities, so activities are placed in the following of spatial contexts and the temporal duration is placed after activities. Between the spatial context reasoning and behavior reasoning of activities, a modified duration HMM is applied to extract activities. According to this design, human behaviors different in spatial contexts Would be distinguished in first module. The behaviors different in activities would be determined in second module. The third module is to recognize behaviors involving different temporal duration. By this design, an abnormal signaling process corresponding to different situations is also placed for application. The developed approach has been applied for understanding of elder behaviors in a nursing center. Results have indicated the promise of the approach which can accurately interpret 85% of the elderly behaviors. For abnormal detection, the approach was found to have 90% accuracy, with 0% false alarm. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.