Human swimming posture recognition combining improved 3D convolutional network and attention residual network

Human swimming posture recognition is a key technology to improve training effect and reduce sports injury by analyzing and recognizing swimmer’s movement posture. However, the existing technical means cannot accomplish the accurate recognition of human swimming posture in underwater environment with high standard. For this reason, the study takes the 3D convolutional neural network as the model basis, and introduces the global average pooling and batch normalization to optimize its network structure and data processing, respectively. Meanwhile, full pre-activation residual network and three-branch structure convolutional attention mechanism are added to improve the feature extraction and recognition. Finally, a novel human swimming posture recognition model is proposed. The outcomes revealed that this model had the highest recognition accuracy of 95%, the highest recall of 93.26% and the highest F1 value of 92.87%. The lowest pose recognition errors were up to 4.7%, 4.9%, 2.1% and 6.6% for freestyle, breaststroke, butterfly and backstroke, respectively. The shortest recognition time was 6.78 s for the freestyle item, which minimized the recognition time and reduced the recognition error compared with the same type of recognition model. The new model proposed by the research shows significant advantages in recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. It can provide more effective support for recognizing athletes’ swimming posture for future swimming endeavors.