Hybrid fuzzy C-means CPD-based segmentation for improving sensor-based multi-resident activity recognition

Multiresident activity recognition (AR), which has become a popular research field in smart environments, aims to recognize the activities of multiple residents based on data collected from various types of sensors, and sensor events segmentation is an important technique for enhancing the performance of AR. While quite some segmentation methods have been proposed for the single person setting, few studies have been done for the multiresident setting. In this article, we first evaluate the baseline and the state-of-the-art segmentation methods using the popular multiresident data set CASAS, to confirm that the performance of multiresident AR can be improved by applying segmentation techniques; we then propose a novel Hybrid fuzzy c-means (FCM) change point detection (CPD)-based segmentation method that can further enhance the performance of multiresident AR. We combine a FCM method with a CPD-based method for sensor event segmentation. The FCM method is used to classify the sensor events in terms of sensor locations, and then the CPD technique is used to probe the transition actions to determine the segmentation sequence. Our experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of multiresident AR in comparison with the baseline and state-of-the-art classification methods.