Abstract: Human activity recognition (HAR) is a research hotspot in the field of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. The electrooculography (EOG)-based HAR system has attracted much attention due to its good realizability and great application potential. Focusing on the signal processing method of the EOG-HAR system, we propose a robust EOG-based saccade recognition using the multi-channel convolutional independent component analysis (ICA) method. To establish frequency-domain observation vectors, short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is used to process time-domain EOG signals by applying the sliding window technique. Subsequently, we apply the joint approximative diagonalization of eigenmatrix (JADE) algorithm to separate the mixed signals and choose the “clean” saccadic source to extract features. To address the problem of permutation ambiguity in a case with a six-channel condition, we developed a constraint direction of arrival (DOA) algorithm that can automatically adjust the order of eye movement sources according to the constraint angle. Recognition experiments of four different saccadic EOG signals (i.e. up, down, left and right) were conducted in a laboratory environment. The average recognition ratios over 13 subjects were 95.66% and 97.33% under the between-subjects test and the within-subjects test, respectively. Compared with “bandpass filtering”, “wavelet denoising”, “extended infomax algorithm”, “frequency-domain JADE algorithm” and “time-domain JADE algorithm, the recognition ratios obtained relative increments of 4.6%, 3.49%, 2.85%, 2.81% and 2.91% (within-subjects test) and 4.91%, 3.43%, 2.21%, 2.24% and 2.28% (between-subjects test), respectively. The experimental results revealed that the proposed algorithm presents robust classification performance in saccadic EOG signal recognition.