Deep Learning for Sensor-based Activity Recognition: A Survey

Sensor-based activity recognition seeks the profound high-level knowledge about human activity from multitudes of low-level sensor readings. Conventional pattern recognition approaches have made tremendous progress in the past years. However, most of those approaches heavily rely on heuristic hand-crafted feature extraction methods, which dramatically hinder their generalization performance. Additionally, those methods often produce unsatisfactory results for unsupervised and incremental learning tasks. Meanwhile, the recent advancement of deep learning makes it possible to perform automatic high-level feature extraction thus achieves promising performance in many areas. Since then, deep learning based methods have been widely adopted for the sensor-based activity recognition tasks. In this paper, we survey and highlight the recent advancement of deep learning approaches for sensor-based activity recognition. Specifically, we summarize existing literatures from three aspects: sensor modality, deep model and application. We also present a detailed discussion and propose grand challenges for future direction.