DeepSense: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Time-Series Mobile Sensing Data Processing

TL;DR

DeepSense is a versatile deep learning framework that effectively processes noisy mobile sensor time-series data for various applications, outperforming existing methods while being feasible for smartphone deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a unified deep learning approach combining CNNs and RNNs to handle noise and feature extraction challenges across diverse mobile sensing tasks.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in car tracking, activity recognition, and user identification.

Effective on smartphones with moderate energy use and low latency.

Demonstrates robustness to sensor noise and diverse user behaviors.

Abstract

Mobile sensing applications usually require time-series inputs from sensors. Some applications, such as tracking, can use sensed acceleration and rate of rotation to calculate displacement based on physical system models. Other applications, such as activity recognition, extract manually designed features from sensor inputs for classification. Such applications face two challenges. On one hand, on-device sensor measurements are noisy. For many mobile applications, it is hard to find a distribution that exactly describes the noise in practice. Unfortunately, calculating target quantities based on physical system and noise models is only as accurate as the noise assumptions. Similarly, in classification applications, although manually designed features have proven to be effective, it is not always straightforward to find the most robust features to accommodate diverse sensor noise patterns and user behaviors. To this end, we propose DeepSense, a deep learning framework that directly addresses the aforementioned noise and feature customization challenges in a unified manner. DeepSense integrates convolutional and recurrent neural networks to exploit local interactions among similar mobile sensors, merge local interactions of different sensory modalities into global interactions, and extract temporal relationships to model signal dynamics. DeepSense thus provides a general signal estimation and classification framework that accommodates a wide range of applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepSense using three representative and challenging tasks: car tracking with motion sensors, heterogeneous human activity recognition, and user identification with biometric motion analysis. DeepSense significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for all three tasks. In addition, DeepSense is feasible to implement on smartphones due to its moderate energy consumption and low latency