Robust Multimodal Fusion for Human Activity Recognition

Abstract: The proliferation of IoT and mobile devices equipped with heterogeneous sensors has enabled new applications that rely on the fusion of time-series data generated by multiple sensors with different modalities. While there are promising deep neural network architectures for multimodal fusion, their performance falls apart quickly in the presence of consecutive missing data and noise across multiple modalities/sensors, the issues that are prevalent in real-world settings. We propose Centaur, a multimodal fusion model for human activity recognition (HAR) that is robust to these data quality issues. Centaur combines a data cleaning module, which is a denoising autoencoder with convolutional layers, and a multimodal fusion module, which is a deep convolutional neural network with the self-attention mechanism to capture cross-sensor correlation. We train Centaur using a stochastic data corruption scheme and evaluate it on three datasets that contain data generated by multiple inertial measurement units. Centaur's data cleaning module outperforms 2 state-of-the-art autoencoder-based models and its multimodal fusion module outperforms 4 strong baselines. Compared to 2 related robust fusion architectures, Centaur is more robust, achieving 11.59-17.52% higher accuracy in HAR, especially in the presence of consecutive missing data in multiple sensor channels.