A Hybrid Millimeter-Wave Radar–Ultrasonic Fusion System for Robust Human Activity Recognition with Attention-Enhanced Deep Learning

To address the tradeoff between environmental robustness and fine-grained accuracy in single-sensor human behavior recognition, this paper proposes a non-contact system fusing 77 GHz SIFT (mmWave) radar and a 40 kHz ultrasonic array. The system leverages radar’s long-range penetration and low-visibility adaptability, paired with ultrasound’s centimeter-level short-range precision and electromagnetic clutter immunity. A synchronized data acquisition platform ensures multi-modal signal consistency, while wavelet transform (for radar) and STFT (for ultrasound) extract complementary time–frequency features. The proposed Attention-CNN-BiLSTM architecture integrates local spatial feature extraction, bidirectional temporal dependency modeling, and salient cue enhancement. Experimental results on 1600 synchronized sequences (four behaviors: standing, sitting, walking, falling) show a 98.6% mean class accuracy with subject-wise generalization, outperforming single-sensor baselines and traditional deep learning models. As a privacy-preserving, lighting-agnostic solution, it offers promising applications in smart homes, healthcare monitoring, and intelligent surveillance, providing a robust technical foundation for contactless behavior recognition.