Enhancing human activity recognition using deep learning and time series augmented data

Human activity recognition is concerned with detecting different types of human movements and actions using data gathered from various types of sensors. Deep learning approaches, when applied on time series data, offer promising results over intensive handcrafted feature extraction techniques that are highly reliant on the quality of defined domain parameters. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of time series data augmentation in improving the accuracy of several deep learning models on human activity data gathered from mobile phone accelerometers. More specifically, we compare the performance of the Vanilla, Long-Short Term Memory, and Gated Recurrent Units neural network models on three open-source datasets. We use two time series data augmentation techniques and study their impact on the accuracy of the target models. The experiments show that using gated recurrent units achieves the best results in terms of accuracy and training time followed by the long-short term memory technique. Furthermore, the results show that using data augmentation significantly enhances recognition quality.