Classifying falls using out-of-distribution detection in human activity recognition

As the research community focuses on improving the reliability of deep learning, identifying out-of-distribution (OOD) data has become crucial. Detecting OOD inputs during test/prediction allows the model to account for discriminative features unknown to the model. This capability increases the model’s reliability since this model provides a class prediction solely at incoming data similar to the training one. Although OOD detection is well-established in computer vision, it is relatively unexplored in other areas, like time series-based human activity recognition (HAR). Since uncertainty has been a critical driver for OOD in vision-based models, the same component has proven effective in time-series applications. In this work, we propose an ensemble-based temporal learning framework to address the OOD detection problem in HAR with time-series data. First, we define different types of OOD for HAR that arise from realistic scenarios. Then we apply our ensemble-based temporal learning framework incorporating uncertainty to detect OODs for the defined HAR workloads. This particular formulation also allows a novel approach to fall detection. We train our model on non-fall activities and detect falls as OOD. Our method shows state-of-the-art performance in a fall detection task using much lesser data. Furthermore, the ensemble framework outperformed the traditional deep-learning method (our baseline) on the OOD detection task across all the other chosen datasets.