Feng Jin

Feng Jin, Arindam Sengupta, Siyang Cao

In this paper we propose mmFall - a novel fall detection system, which comprises of (i) the emerging millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensor to collect the human body's point cloud along with the body centroid, and (ii) a variational recurrent autoencoder (VRAE) to compute the anomaly level of the body motion based on the acquired point cloud. A fall is claimed to have occurred when the spike in anomaly level and the drop in centroid height occur simultaneously. The mmWave radar sensor provides several advantages, such as privacycompliance and high-sensitivity to motion, over the traditional sensing modalities. However, (i) randomness in radar point cloud data and (ii) difficulties in fall collection/labeling in the traditional supervised fall detection approaches are the two main challenges. To overcome the randomness in radar data, the proposed VRAE uses variational inference, a probabilistic approach rather than the traditional deterministic approach, to infer the posterior probability of the body's latent motion state at each frame, followed by a recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn the temporal features of the motion over multiple frames. Moreover, to circumvent the difficulties in fall data collection/labeling, the VRAE is built upon an autoencoder architecture in a semi-supervised approach, and trained on only normal activities of daily living (ADL) such that in the inference stage the VRAE will generate a spike in the anomaly level once an abnormal motion, such as fall, occurs. During the experiment, we implemented the VRAE along with two other baselines, and tested on the dataset collected in an apartment. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve indicates that our proposed model outperforms the other two baselines, and achieves 98% detection out of 50 falls at the expense of just 2 false alarms.

Arindam Sengupta, Feng Jin, Renyuan Zhang et al.

In this paper, mm-Pose, a novel approach to detect and track human skeletons in real-time using an mmWave radar, is proposed. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first method to detect >15 distinct skeletal joints using mmWave radar reflection signals. The proposed method would find several applications in traffic monitoring systems, autonomous vehicles, patient monitoring systems and defense forces to detect and track human skeleton for effective and preventive decision making in real-time. The use of radar makes the system operationally robust to scene lighting and adverse weather conditions. The reflected radar point cloud in range, azimuth and elevation are first resolved and projected in Range-Azimuth and Range-Elevation planes. A novel low-size high-resolution radar-to-image representation is also presented, that overcomes the sparsity in traditional point cloud data and offers significant reduction in the subsequent machine learning architecture. The RGB channels were assigned with the normalized values of range, elevation/azimuth and the power level of the reflection signals for each of the points. A forked CNN architecture was used to predict the real-world position of the skeletal joints in 3-D space, using the radar-to-image representation. The proposed method was tested for a single human scenario for four primary motions, (i) Walking, (ii) Swinging left arm, (iii) Swinging right arm, and (iv) Swinging both arms to validate accurate predictions for motion in range, azimuth and elevation. The detailed methodology, implementation, challenges, and validation results are presented.

Feng Jin, Shiliang Sun

Traditional neural network approaches for traffic flow forecasting are usually single task learning (STL) models, which do not take advantage of the information provided by related tasks. In contrast to STL, multitask learning (MTL) has the potential to improve generalization by transferring information in training signals of extra tasks. In this paper, MTL based neural networks are used for traffic flow forecasting. For neural network MTL, a backpropagation (BP) network is constructed by incorporating traffic flows at several contiguous time instants into an output layer. Nodes in the output layer can be seen as outputs of different but closely related STL tasks. Comprehensive experiments on urban vehicular traffic flow data and comparisons with STL show that MTL in BP neural networks is a promising and effective approach for traffic flow forecasting.