  The problem of human activity recognition is central for understanding and
predicting the human behavior, in particular in a prospective of assistive
services to humans, such as health monitoring, well being, security, etc. There
is therefore a growing need to build accurate models which can take into
account the variability of the human activities over time (dynamic models)
rather than static ones which can have some limitations in such a dynamic
context. In this paper, the problem of activity recognition is analyzed through
the segmentation of the multidimensional time series of the acceleration data
measured in the 3-d space using body-worn accelerometers. The proposed model
for automatic temporal segmentation is a specific statistical latent process
model which assumes that the observed acceleration sequence is governed by
sequence of hidden (unobserved) activities. More specifically, the proposed
approach is based on a specific multiple regression model incorporating a
hidden discrete logistic process which governs the switching from one activity
to another over time. The model is learned in an unsupervised context by
maximizing the observed-data log-likelihood via a dedicated
expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. We applied it on a real-world
automatic human activity recognition problem and its performance was assessed
by performing comparisons with alternative approaches, including well-known
supervised static classifiers and the standard hidden Markov model (HMM). The
obtained results are very encouraging and show that the proposed approach is
quite competitive even it works in an entirely unsupervised way and does not
requires a feature extraction preprocessing step.
