MuJo: Multimodal Joint Feature Space Learning for Human Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a long-standing problem in artificial intelligence with applications in a broad range of areas, including healthcare, sports and fitness, security, and more. The performance of HAR in real-world settings is strongly dependent on the type and quality of the input signal that can be acquired. Given an unobstructed, high-quality camera view of a scene, computer vision systems, in particular in conjunction with foundation models, can today fairly reliably distinguish complex activities. On the other hand, recognition using modalities such as wearable sensors (which are often more broadly available, e.g., in mobile phones and smartwatches) is a more difficult problem, as the signals often contain less information and labeled training data is more difficult to acquire. To alleviate the need for labeled data, we introduce our comprehensive Fitness Multimodal Activity Dataset (FiMAD) in this work, which can be used with the proposed pre-training method MuJo (Multimodal Joint Feature Space Learning) to enhance HAR performance across various modalities. FiMAD was created using YouTube fitness videos and contains parallel video, language, pose, and simulated IMU sensor data. MuJo utilizes this dataset to learn a joint feature space for these modalities. We show that classifiers pre-trained on FiMAD can increase the performance on real HAR datasets such as MM-Fit, MyoGym, MotionSense, and MHEALTH. For instance, on MM-Fit, we achieve a Macro F1-Score of up to 0.855 when fine-tuning on only 2% of the training data and 0.942 when utilizing the complete training set for classification tasks. We compare our approach with other self-supervised ones and show that, unlike them, ours consistently improves compared to the baseline network performance while also providing better data efficiency.