Recognition of sports and daily activities through deep learning and convolutional block attention

Abstract

Portable devices like accelerometers and physiological trackers capture movement and biometric data relevant to sports. This study uses data from wearable sensors to investigate deep learning techniques for recognizing human behaviors associated with sports and fitness. The proposed CNN-BiGRU-CBAM model, a unique hybrid architecture, combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional gated recurrent unit networks (BiGRUs), and convolutional block attention modules (CBAMs) for accurate activity recognition. CNN layers extract spatial patterns, BiGRU captures temporal context, and CBAM focuses on informative BiGRU features, enabling precise activity pattern identification. The novelty lies in seamlessly integrating these components to learn spatial and temporal relationships, prioritizing significant features for activity detection. The model and baseline deep learning models were trained on the UCI-DSA dataset, evaluating with 5-fold cross-validation, including multi-class classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The CNN-BiGRU-CBAM model outperformed baseline models like CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, and BiGRU, achieving state-of-the-art results with 99.10% accuracy and F1-score across all activity classes. This breakthrough enables accurate identification of sports and everyday activities using simplified wearables and advanced deep learning techniques, facilitating athlete monitoring, technique feedback, and injury risk detection. The proposed model’s design and thorough evaluation significantly advance human activity recognition for sports and fitness.

Keywords

• Human activity recognition
• Sport and daily activity
• Deep learning
• Wearable sensor
• Convolutional block attention modules