Improving Human Activity Recognition for Sparse Radar Point Clouds: A Graph Neural Network Model with Pre-Trained 3D Human-Joint Coordinates

Abstract

Many devices have been used to detect human action, including wearable devices, cameras, lidars, and radars. However, some people, such as the elderly and young children, may not know how to use wearable devices effectively. Cameras have the disadvantage of invading privacy, and lidar is rather expensive. In contrast, radar, which is widely used commercially, is easily accessible and relatively cheap. However, due to the limitations of radio waves, radar data are sparse and not easy to use for human activity recognition. In this study, we present a novel human activity recognition model that consists of a pre-trained model and graph neural networks (GNNs). First, we overcome the sparsity of the radar data. To achieve that, we use a model pre-trained with the 3D coordinates of radar data and Kinect data that represents the ground truth. With this pre-trained model, we extract reliable features as 3D human joint coordinate estimates from sparse radar data. Then, a GNN model is used to extract additional information in the spatio-temporal domain from these joint coordinate estimates. Our approach was evaluated using the MMActivity dataset, which includes five different human activities. Our system achieved an accuracy of 96%. The experimental result demonstrates that our algorithm is more effective than five other baseline models.