Automatic equine activity detection by convolutional neural networks using accelerometer data

摘要

In recent years, with a widespread of sensors embedded in all kind of mobile devices, human activity analysis is occurring more often in several domains like healthcare monitoring and fitness tracking. This trend did also enter the equestrian world because monitoring behaviours can yield important information about the health and welfare of horses. In this research, a deep learning-based approach for activity detection of equines is proposed to classify seven activities based on accelerometer data. We propose using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) by which features are extracted automatically by using strong computing capabilities. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the sampling frequency, the time series length and the type of underground on which the data is gathered on the recognition accuracy and evaluate the model on three types of experimental datasets that are compiled of labelled accelerometer data gathered from six different subjects performing seven different activities. Afterwards, a horse-wise cross validation is carried out to investigate the impact of the subjects themselves on the model recognition accuracy. Finally, a slightly adjusted model is validated on different amounts of 50 Hz sensor data.