Triple Spectral Fusion for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition
Authors: Ye Zhang, Longguang Wang, Qing Gao, Chaocan Xiang, Mohammed Bennamoun, Yulan Guo
Abstract
The field of sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) mainly uses posture, motion and context data of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to identify daily activities. Despite the advancements in learning-based methods, it is challenging to perform information fusion from the temporal perspective due to the complexities in fusing heterogeneous sensor data and establishing long-term context correlations. This paper proposes a novel triple spectral fusion framework tailored for HAR. First, we develop an adaptive complementary filtering technique for noise suppression and organize each IMU's sensors into posture and motion modality nodes. Given that IMU nodes form a dynamic heterogeneous graph, we then apply adaptive filtering within the graph Fourier domain to merge both homogeneous and heterogeneous node information. Furthermore, an adaptive wavelet frequency selection approach is implemented to suppress context redundancy and shorten the length of features. This approach enhances both timestamp-based graph aggregation and the correlation of long-term contexts. Our framework uses adaptive filtering in the Fourier, graph Fourier, and wavelet domains, enabling effective multi-sensor fusion and context correlation. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework. Project page: https://github.com/crocodilegogogo/TSF-TPAMI2026.
Recent advances in Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensors have shown that multi-modal deep learning models consistently outperform their uni-modal counterparts. Modalities can include IMUs, RGB cameras, audio signals, and others. One important aspect of multi-modal deep learning is the sensor fusion approach we apply. Over recent years, multiple fusion paradigms have been proposed for multi-modal HAR. However, to the best of our knowledge, no head-to-head comparison of these paradigms exists on a common multi-modal HAR benchmark dataset. To address this research gap, we systematically compare seven state-of-the-art sensor fusion methods on the recently released HARMES dataset, which comprises 61 hours of fully labeled IMU, audio, and ambient humidity data. The chosen dataset focuses on 15 household and personal hygiene activities of daily living (ADLs). By applying the seven different fusion techniques to a state-of-the-art multi-modal model architecture, we show that Gated Multi-modal Fusion achieves the highest macro F1-score (0.82), surpassing the concatenation-based late fusion HARMES paper baseline of 0.76 by +6pp under leave-one-participant-out evaluation. All code used in our experiments is made publicly available on GitHub.
Ahmed Mohamady, Robin Burchard, Kristof Van Laerhoven
Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) has achieved significant progressed in fully supervised learning settings. However, these supervised learning models rely on large amount of labeled data, which require labor-intensive collection and meticulous annotation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture framework tailored for sensor-based HAR, designed to learn robust and generalizable representations from unlabeled datasets. The proposed framework features an encoder designed to explicitly model both the fine-grained local temporal representations within individual window and the long-term temporal sequence of adjacent windows. Furthermore, we introduce an improved Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg) objective function that incorporates computationally lightweight norm term to stabilize the JEPA pre-training phase. This term balances variance, invariance and covariance constraints to prevent representation collapse. The proposed HAR-JEPA framework is evaluated using two benchmark continuously performed activity datasets. The results show that high-quality representations are successfully learned by the proposed framework. Furthermore, the representations learned by HAR-JEPA demonstrates superior generalization on minority, high variance transitional activities such as sit-to-stand and sit-to-lie where supervised learning tend to overfit due to limited support.
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) aims to interpret and classify user behaviors from temporal motion signals. Recently, deep learning frameworks have advanced this task by learning and extracting discriminative spatiotemporal representations, significantly improving recognition performance. However, IMU-based HAR still faces several critical challenges, particularly limited training samples and static knowledge utilization, both of which severely hinder its large-scale deployment. In this paper, we introduce MoRA, the first Retrieval-Augmented Module specifically designed for motion series. It can be flexibly integrated into any existing HAR model, enhancing recognition performance while maintaining inference efficiency. To address issues such as information redundancy in retrieval results and rigid fusion strategies, we propose an uncertainty-adaptive fusion unit within MoRA. This unit leverages previous physical knowledge from IMU signals to dynamically adjust the fusion strategy between original outputs and retrieved information, enabling more robust recognition. Extensive experiments on ten real-world datasets demonstrate that MoRA significantly improves the performance of existing IMU-based HAR models, consistently delivering stable and effective gains. The source code of MoRA is available at: https://github.com/liavonpenn/mora.