Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes Based on a Difference of Convex Programming Problem

Smart homes are the new generation of homes where pervasive computing is employed to make the lives of the residents more convenient. Human activity recognition (HAR) is a fundamental task in these environments. Since critical decisions will be made based on HAR results, accurate recognition of human activities with low uncertainty is of crucial importance. In this paper, a novel HAR method based on a difference of convex programming (DCP) problem is represented, which manages to handle uncertainty. For this purpose, given an input sensor data stream, a primary belief in each activity is calculated for the sensor events. Since the primary beliefs are calculated based on some abstractions, they naturally bear an amount of uncertainty. To mitigate the effect of the uncertainty, a DCP problem is defined and solved to yield secondary beliefs. In this procedure, the uncertainty stemming from a sensor event is alleviated by its neighboring sensor events in the input stream. The final activity inference is based on the secondary beliefs. The proposed method is evaluated using a well-known and publicly available dataset. It is compared to four HAR schemes, which are based on temporal probabilistic graphical models, and a convex optimization-based HAR procedure, as benchmarks. The proposed method outperforms the benchmarks, having an acceptable accuracy of 82.61%, and an average F-measure of 82.3%.