Real-life boxing activity recognition with smartphones using attention assisted deep learning models

Mobile computing technologies play a pivotal role in narrowing the gap between athletes and sports monitoring systems, while also advancing towards intelligent and automatic supervision of individual sports activities. The widespread presence of smartphones equipped with multifunctional sensors has enabled the acquisition and analysis of data, facilitating Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Although recognising sports activities using a smart mobile phone’s accelerometer is widely used, traditional methods struggle with intricate and real time activities due to the high-dimensional sensor data. This study introduces a smartphone-based architecture for HAR utilising inertial accelerometers to record athlete’s game actions data sequences, extract relevant features and derive the player’s activity data through multiple three-axis accelerometers. In this paper an Attention assisted Deep Convolution Neural Network based Bi-LSTM (AT-DCNN-BL) model is proposed. The raw data undergoes sliding window pre-processing technique, the deep learning framework of deep convolution neural network layers helps in automatic feature extraction, the bi-LSTM structure process the boxing activity data and the attention is focussed over the boxing activity classification data. The attention mechanism redistributes the weights of the extracted features which aids in increasing the classification accuracy. Other classification models like Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM), Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN) and Random Forest (RF) are also applied to the dataset collected from a mobile sensor. The study explores training of deep learning methods and illustrates the superiority of the proposed approach over others using the collected mobile sensor dataset. The AT-DCNN-BL model achieved a higher classification accuracy compared to the other models. The AT-DCNN-BL model outperformed all the other models achieving a higher accuracy rate (92.71%).