Log-Viterbi algorithm applied on second-order hidden Markov model for human activity recognition

Recognition of human activities is getting into the limelight among researchers in the field of pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, robotic, and monitoring such as assistive living, elderly care, and health care. Many platforms, models, and algorithms have been developed and implemented to recognize the human activities. However, existing approaches suffer from low-activity accuracy and high time complexity. Therefore, we proposed probabilistic log-Viterbi algorithm on second-order hidden Markov model that facilitates our algorithm by reducing the time complexity with increased accuracy. Second-order hidden Markov model is efficient relevance between previous two activities, current activity, and current observation that incorporate more information into recognition procedure. The log-Viterbi algorithm converts the products of a large number of probabilities into additions and finds the most likely activity from observation sequence under given model. Therefore, this approach maximizes the probability of activity recognition with improved accuracy and reduced time complexity. We compared our proposed algorithm among other famous probabilistic models such as Naïve Bayes, condition random field, hidden Markov model, and hidden semi-Markov model using three datasets in the smart home environment. The recognition possibility of our proposed method is significantly better in accuracy and time complexity than early proposed method. Moreover, this improved algorithm for activity recognition is much effective for almost all the dynamic environments such as assistive living, elderly care, healthcare applications, and home automation.