Robust Continuous Human Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning and Distributed Radar Sensors

Abstract

Continuous human activity recognition (HAR) with distributed radar sensor networks is challenging because Doppler signatures depend strongly on aspect angle, the informativeness of individual radar views varies with motion direction, and activity transitions in uninterrupted sequences are often ambiguous. This paper proposes a ConvNeXt-MHSA-BiGRU framework for frame-wise continuous HAR from Doppler-time spectrograms acquired by five spatially distributed radar nodes. A shared ConvNeXt-inspired encoder extracts time-frequency representations from each radar stream, while radar-wise multi-head self attention (MHSA) models inter-node dependencies and adaptively fuses complementary views. RadarDropout and SpecAugment-style time-frequency masking regularize the network against unreliable radar views and local spectrogram perturbations, whereas stacked bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRUs) exploit temporal context for frame-wise classification across activity transitions. The framework is evaluated on nine activities performed by 14 participants using leave-one-person-out (L1PO) subject-independent testing with fivefold cross-validation. It achieves a mean L1PO test accuracy of 87.56% across the 14 held-out subjects and improves recognition performance over the published CNN-RNN baseline. The results demonstrate that combining modern spectrogram encoding, adaptive radar view fusion, and bidirectional temporal modeling provides an effective framework for continuous and distributed radar-based HAR.