Activity recognition

Activity recognition aims to recognize the actions and goals of one or more agents from a series of observations on the agents' actions and the environmental conditions. Since the 1980s, this research field has captured the attention of several computer science communities due to its strength in providing personalized support for many different applications and its connection to many different fields of study such as medicine, human-computer interaction, or sociology. Due to its multifaceted nature, different fields may refer to activity recognition as plan recognition, goal recognition, intent recognition, behavior recognition, location estimation and location-based services. Sensor-based activity recognition integrates the emerging area of sensor networks with novel data mining and machine learning techniques to model a wide range of human activities. Mobile devices (e.g. smart phones) provide sufficient sensor data and calculation power to enable physical activity recognition to provide an estimation of the energy consumption during everyday life. Sensor-based activity recognition researchers believe that by empowering ubiquitous computers and sensors to monitor the behavior of agents (under consent), these computers will be better suited to act on our behalf. Visual sensors that incorporate color and depth information, such as the Kinect, allow more accurate automatic action recognition and fuse many emerging applications such as interactive education and smart environments. Multiple views of visual sensor enables the development of machine learning for automatic view invariant action recognition. More advanced sensors used in 3D motion capture systems allow highly accurate automatic recognition, in the expenses of more complicated hardware system setup. Sensor-based activity recognition is a challenging task due to the inherent noisy nature of the input. Thus, statistical modeling has been the main thrust in this direction in layers, where the recognition at several intermediate levels is conducted and connected.