Automatic Annotation for Human Activity Recognition in Free Living Using a Smartphone.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Data annotation is a time-consuming process posing major limitations to the development of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems. The availability of a large amount of labeled data is required for supervised Machine Learning (ML) approaches, especially in the case of online and personalized approaches requiring user specific datasets to be labeled. The availability of such datasets has the potential to help address common problems of smartphone-based HAR, such as inter-person variability. In this work, we present (i) an automatic labeling method facilitating the collection of labeled datasets in free-living conditions using the smartphone, and (ii) we investigate the robustness of common supervised classification approaches under instances of noisy data. We evaluated the results with a dataset consisting of 38 days of manually labeled data collected in free living. The comparison between the manually and the automatically labeled ground truth demonstrated that it was possible to obtain labels automatically with an 80⁻85% average precision rate. Results obtained also show how a supervised approach trained using automatically generated labels achieved an 84% f-score (using Neural Networks and Random Forests); however, results also demonstrated how the presence of label noise could lower the f-score up to 64⁻74% depending on the classification approach (Nearest Centroid and Multi-Class Support Vector Machine).

Authors

  • Federico Cruciani
    Computer Science Research Institute, Ulster University, Newtownabbey BT370QB, UK. f.cruciani@ulster.ac.uk.
  • Ian Cleland
    Computer Science Research Institute, Ulster University, Newtownabbey BT370QB, UK. i.cleland@ulster.ac.uk.
  • Chris Nugent
  • Paul McCullagh
    Computer Science Research Institute, Ulster University, Newtownabbey BT370QB, UK. pj.mccullagh@ulster.ac.uk.
  • Kåre Synnes
    Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, 97187 Luleå, Sweden. kare.synnes@ltu.se.
  • Josef Hallberg
    Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, 97187 Luleå, Sweden. josef.hallberg@ltu.se.