Uniform Evaluation of Properties in Activity Recognition

The main additional problem in activity recognition (AR) systems in contrast to traditional ones is the importance of duration: a predicted concept in AR is durative and can be correct in a period and incorrect in another one. Therefore, it is fundamental to extend the correctness vocabulary and to formalize a new evaluation system including these extensions. Even in similar areas, few empirical attempts are proposed which are confronted with the problems of correctness and completeness. In this paper, we propose the first formal multi-modal evaluation approach for durative concepts. This novel mathematical method evaluates the performance of an AR system from multiple perspectives, including detection, total duration, relative duration, boundary alignment, and uniformity. It extracts the properties considered in the state-of-the-art and redefines the well-known true-positive, false-positive and false-negative terms for durative events. Our proposed method is extensible, interpretable, customizable, open source and improves the expressiveness of the evaluation while its computation complexity remains linear. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are conducted to show the usefulness of our proposed method.