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.
Authors
- Kwok L. Chung (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5381-7327)
- Yao Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8745-191X)
- Shiquan Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6009-1405)
- Tao Ye
- Luxin Tang
- Yaowen Wu
- Pingchuan Xu
- Yuhao Bi
Institutions
- Nanyang Technological University (SG)
- Guangdong Institute of Intelligent Manufacturing (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Sensors
- Published
- 2026-02-06
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/s26031057
- Primary Topic
- Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00