Enhancing real-time patient activity recognition for consistent performance in varying illumination and complex indoor environment

Abstract Human Activity Recognition (HAR) holds significant importance in health and human-machine interaction. However, recognizing actions from 2D information faces challenges like occlusion, illumination variation, cluttered backgrounds, and view invariance. These hurdles are particularly pronounced in indoor patient monitoring settings due to fluctuating lighting conditions and cluttered backgrounds, which compromise the accuracy of activity recognition systems. A new architecture named IlluminationRevive has been proposed to tackle this issue, which utilizes an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) and image post-processing blocks to enhance the image’s visual appearance. A new dataset comprising seven indoor physical activities has been proposed, created with contributions from thirty individuals aged 20–45. A hybrid fusion architecture is proposed to classify activities, integrating motion sequence information and body joint features. The proposed classification model incorporates generated Skeleton Motion History Images (SMHIs), collected human joint motion features from video frames, and novel kinematic and geometric features within window frames as inputs. The model can extract spatial and temporal feature vectors by integrating ResNet50-ViT (Residual Network-50 layers, Vision Transformer) and CNN-BiLSTM (Convolutional Neural Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) layers. The suggested classification model was evaluated alongside state-of-the-art models using the LNMIIT-SMD (The LNM Institute of Information Technology-Skeleton Motion Dataset) and established NTU-RGBD (Nanyang Technological University’s Red Blue Green and Depth information) dataset. The evaluation aimed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed classification model architecture. Results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, achieving impressive accuracies of 98.21% on real-time data, 98.45% on the proposed dataset, and 97.12% on the NTU-RGBD dataset. This high-accuracy, low-latency approach enhances robotic perception for healthcare applications, enabling service robots to perform real-time patient monitoring and assistive tasks in dynamic indoor environments.