Noninvasive Human Activity Recognition Using Millimeter-Wave Radar

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar technology has attracted significant attention because it is susceptible to environmental lighting, wall shielding, and privacy concern. This article proposes a novel noninvasive human activity recognition system using a mmWave radar. The proposed framework first transforms mmWave signals into point clouds. Generally speaking, it consists of four major components: denosing, enhanced voxelization, data augmentation, and dual-view machine learning to lead to accurate and efficient human activity recognition. The proposed new methodology considers the spatial-temporal point clouds in physical environments through a modified voxelization approach, enriches the sparse data based on the symmetry property of radar rotations, and learns the activity using a dual-view convolutional neural network. To evaluate the performance of the proposed learning models, a dataset involving seven different activities has been established using a mmWave radar platform. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed system can achieve 97.61% and 98% accuracies during the tests of fall detection and activity classification, respectively. In comparison, the proposed scheme greatly outperforms four other conventional machine learning schemes in terms of the overall accuracy.