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Human Activity Recognition (HAR), alongside Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), are integral components of smart homes, sports, surveillance, and investigation activities. To recognize daily activities, researchers are focusing on lightweight, cost-effective, wearable sensor-based technologies as traditional vision-based technologies lack elderly privacy, a fundamental right of every human. However, it is challenging to extract potential features from 1D multi-sensor data. Thus, this research focuses on extracting distinguishable patterns and deep features from spectral images by time-frequency-domain analysis of 1D multi-sensor data. Wearable sensor data, particularly accelerator and gyroscope data, act as input signals of different daily activities, and provide potential information using time-frequency analysis. This potential time series information is mapped into spectral images through a process called use of ’scalograms’, derived from the continuous wavelet transform. The deep activity features are extracted from the activity image using deep learning models such as CNN, MobileNetV3, ResNet, and GoogleNet and subsequently classified using a conventional classifier. To validate the proposed model, SisFall and PAMAP2 benchmark datasets are used. Based on the experimental results, this proposed model shows the optimal performance for activity recognition obtaining an accuracy of 98.4% for SisFall and 98.1% for PAMAP2, using Morlet as the mother wavelet with ResNet-101 and a softmax classifier, and outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

An optimized robot path-planning algorithm is required for various aspects of robot movements in applications. The efficacy of the robot path-planning model is vulnerable to the number of search nodes, path cost, and time complexity. The conventional A-star (A*) algorithm outperforms other grid-based algorithms because of its heuristic approach. However, the performance of the conventional A* algorithm is suboptimal for the time, space, and number of search nodes, depending on the robot motion block (RMB). To address these challenges, this paper proposes an optimal RMB with an adaptive cost function to improve performance. The proposed adaptive cost function keeps track of the goal node and adaptively calculates the movement costs for quickly arriving at the goal node. Incorporating the adaptive cost function with a selected optimal RMB significantly reduces the searches of less impactful and redundant nodes, which improves the performance of the A* algorithm in terms of the number of search nodes and time complexity. To validate the performance and robustness of the proposed model, an extensive experiment was conducted. In the experiment, an open-source dataset featuring various types of grid maps was customized to incorporate the multiple map sizes and sets of source-to-destination nodes. According to the experiments, the proposed method demonstrated a remarkable improvement of 93.98% in the number of search nodes and 98.94% in time complexity compared to the conventional A* algorithm. The proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms by keeping the path cost largely comparable. Additionally, an ROS experiment using a robot and lidar sensor data shows the improvement of the proposed method in a simulated laboratory environment.

A hyperspectral image (HSI), which contains a number of contiguous and narrow spectral wavelength bands, is a valuable source of data for ground cover examinations. Classification using the entire original HSI suffers from the “curse of dimensionality” problem because (i) the image bands are highly correlated both spectrally and spatially, (ii) not every band can carry equal information, (iii) there is a lack of enough training samples for some classes, and (iv) the overall computational cost is high. Therefore, effective feature (band) reduction is necessary through feature extraction (FE) and/or feature selection (FS) for improving the classification in a cost-effective manner. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a frequently adopted unsupervised FE method in HSI classification. Nevertheless, its performance worsens when the dataset is noisy, and the computational cost becomes high. Consequently, this study first proposed an efficient FE approach using a normalized mutual information (NMI)-based band grouping strategy, where the classical PCA was applied to each band subgroup for intrinsic FE. Finally, the subspace of the most effective features was generated by the NMI-based minimum redundancy and maximum relevance (mRMR) FS criteria. The subspace of features was then classified using the kernel support vector machine. Two real HSIs collected by the AVIRIS and HYDICE sensors were used in an experiment. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed feature reduction approach significantly improved the classification performance. It achieved the highest overall classification accuracy of 94.93% for the AVIRIS dataset and 99.026% for the HYDICE dataset. Moreover, the proposed approach reduced the computational cost compared with the studied methods.

Inter-robot communication and high computational power are challenging issues for deploying indoor mobile robot applications with sensor data processing. Thus, this paper presents an efficient cloud-based multirobot framework with inter-robot communication and high computational power to deploy autonomous mobile robots for indoor applications. Deployment of usable indoor service robots requires uninterrupted movement and enhanced robot vision with a robust classification of objects and obstacles using vision sensor data in the indoor environment. However, state-of-the-art methods face degraded indoor object and obstacle recognition for multiobject vision frames and unknown objects in complex and dynamic environments. From these points of view, this paper proposes a new object segmentation model to separate objects from a multiobject robotic view-frame. In addition, we present a support vector data description (SVDD)-based one-class support vector machine for detecting unknown objects in an outlier detection fashion for the classification model. A cloud-based convolutional neural network (CNN) model with a SoftMax classifier is used for training and identification of objects in the environment, and an incremental learning method is introduced for adding unknown objects to the robot knowledge. A cloud–robot architecture is implemented using a Node-RED environment to validate the proposed model. A benchmarked object image dataset from an open resource repository and images captured from the lab environment were used to train the models. The proposed model showed good object detection and identification results. The performance of the model was compared with three state-of-the-art models and was found to outperform them. Moreover, the usability of the proposed system was enhanced by the unknown object detection, incremental learning, and cloud-based framework.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using embedded sensors in smartphones and smartwatch has gained popularity in extensive applications in health care monitoring of elderly people, security purpose, robotics, monitoring employees in the industry, and others. However, human behavior analysis using the accelerometer and gyroscope data are typically grounded on supervised classification techniques, where models are showing sub-optimal performance for qualitative and quantitative features. Considering this factor, this paper proposes an efficient and reduce dimension feature extraction model for human activity recognition. In this feature extraction technique, the Enveloped Power Spectrum (EPS) is used for extracting impulse components of the signal using frequency domain analysis which is more robust and noise insensitive. The Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is used as dimensionality reduction procedure to extract the minimum number of discriminant features from envelop spectrum for human activity recognition (HAR). The extracted features are used for human activity recognition using Multi-class Support Vector Machine (MCSVM). The proposed model was evaluated by using two benchmark datasets, i.e., the UCI-HAR and DU-MD datasets. This model is compared with other state-of-the-art methods and the model is outperformed.

Human activity recognition (HAR) techniques are playing a significant role in monitoring the daily activities of human life such as elderly care, investigation activities, healthcare, sports, and smart homes. Smartphones incorporated with varieties of motion sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes are widely used inertial sensors that can identify different physical conditions of human. In recent research, many works have been done regarding human activity recognition. Sensor data of smartphone produces high dimensional feature vectors for identifying human activities. However, all the vectors are not contributing equally for identification process. Including all feature vectors create a phenomenon known as ‘curse of dimensionality’. This research has proposed a hybrid method feature selection process, which includes a filter and wrapper method. The process uses a sequential floating forward search (SFFS) to extract desired features for better activity recognition. Features are then fed to a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) to create nonlinear classifiers by adopting the kernel trick for training and testing purpose. We validated our model with a benchmark dataset. Our proposed system works efficiently with limited hardware resource and provides satisfactory activity identification.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an advanced and multidisciplinary active research domain based on neuroscience, signal processing, biomedical sensors, hardware, etc. Since the last decades, several groundbreaking research has been conducted in this domain. Still, no comprehensive review that covers the BCI domain completely has been conducted yet. Hence, a comprehensive overview of the BCI domain is presented in this study. This study covers several applications of BCI and upholds the significance of this domain. Then, each element of BCI systems, including techniques, datasets, feature extraction methods, evaluation measurement matrices, existing BCI algorithms, and classifiers, are explained concisely. In addition, a brief overview of the technologies or hardware, mostly sensors used in BCI, is appended. Finally, the paper investigates several unsolved challenges of the BCI and explains them with possible solutions.