Leveraging CNN and transfer learning for vision-based human activity recognition

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), there have been significant advancements in the area of human activity recognition (HAR) in recent years. HAR is applicable to wider application such as elderly care, anomalous behaviour detection and surveillance system. Several machine learning algorithms have been employed to predict the activities performed by the human in an environment. However, traditional machine learning approaches have been outperformed by feature engineering methods which can select an optimal set of features. On the contrary, it is known that deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can extract features and reduce the computational cost automatically. In this paper, we use CNN model to predict human activities from Wiezmann Dataset. Specifically, we employ transfer learning to get deep image features and trained machine learning classifiers. Our experimental results showed the accuracy of 96.95% using VGG-16. Our experimental results also confirmed the high performance of VGG-16 as compared to rest of the applied CNN models.