A Novel Skeleton-Based Human Activity Discovery Technique Using Particle Swarm Optimization with Gaussian Mutation

Human activity discovery aims to distinguish the activities performed by humans, without any prior information of what defines each activity. Most methods presented in human activity recognition are supervised, where there are labeled inputs to train the system. In reality, it is difficult to label data because of its huge volume and the variety of activities performed by humans. In this paper, a novel unsupervised approach is proposed to perform human activity discovery in 3D skeleton sequences. First, important frames are selected based on kinetic energy. Next, the displacement of joints, set of statistical, angles, and orientation features are extracted to represent the activities information. Since not all extracted features have useful information, the dimension of features is reduced using PCA. Most human activity discovery proposed are not fully unsupervised. They use pre-segmented videos before categorizing activities. To deal with this, we used the fragmented sliding time window method to segment the time series of activities with some overlapping. Then, activities are discovered by a novel hybrid particle swarm optimization with a Gaussian mutation algorithm to avoid getting stuck in the local optimum. Finally, k-means is applied to the outcome centroids to overcome the slow rate of PSO. Experiments on three datasets have been presented and the results show the proposed method has superior performance in discovering activities in all evaluation parameters compared to the other state-of-the-art methods and has increased accuracy of at least 4 % on average. The code is available here: https://github.com/parhamhadikhani/Human-Activity-Discovery-HPGMK