Open Access

Konstantinos Papadopoulos, Mohieddine Jelali

• The importance of radar-based human activity recognition has increased significantly over the last two decades in safety and smart surveillance applications due to its superiority in vision-based sensing in the presence of poor environmental conditions like low illumination, increased radiative heat, occlusion, and fog. Increased public sensitivity to privacy protection and the progress of cost-effective manufacturing have led to higher acceptance and distribution of this technology. Deep learning approaches have proven that manual feature extraction that relies heavily on process knowledge can be avoided due to its hierarchical, non-descriptive nature. On the other hand, ML techniques based on manual feature extraction provide a robust, yet empirical-based approach, where the computational effort is comparatively low. This review outlines the basics of classical ML- and DL-based human activity recognition and its advances, taking the recent progress in both categories into account. For every category, state-of-the-art methods are introduced, briefly explained, and their related works summarized. A comparative study is performed to evaluate the performance and computational effort based on a benchmarking dataset to provide a common basis for the assessment of the techniques’ degrees of suitability.