A Two-stage Method for Solving Multi-resident Activity Recognition in Smart Environments

To recognize individual activities in multi-resident environments with pervasive sensors, some researchers have pointed out that finding data associations can contribute to activity recognition and previous methods either need or infer data association when recognizing new multi-resident activities based on new observations from sensors. However, it is often difficult to find out data associations, and available approaches to multi-resident activity recognition degrade when the data association is not given or induced with low accuracy. This paper exploits some simple knowledge of multi-resident activities through defining Combined label and the state set, and proposes a two-stage activity recognition method for multi-resident activity recognition. We define Combined label states at the model building phase with the help of data association, and learn Combined label states at the new activity recognition phase without the help of data association. Our two stages method is embodied in the new activity recognition phase, where we figure out multi-resident activities in the second stage after learning Combined label states at first stage. The experiments using the multi-resident CASAS data demonstrate that our method can increase the recognition accuracy by approximately 10%.