With the prevalence of the commodity depth cameras, the new paradigm of user interfaces based on 3D motion capturing and recognition have dramatically changed the way of interactions between human and computers. Human action recognition, as one of the key components in these devices, plays an important role to guarantee the quality of user experience. Although the model-driven methods have achieved huge success, they cannot provide a scalable solution for efficiently storing, retrieving and recognizing actions in the large-scale applications. These models are also vulnerable to the temporal translation and warping, as well as the variations in motion scales and execution rates. To address these challenges, we propose to treat the 3D human action recognition as a video-level hashing problem and propose a novel First-Take-All (FTA) Hashing algorithm capable of hashing the entire video into hash codes of fixed length. We demonstrate that this FTA algorithm produces a compact representation of the video invariant to the above mentioned variations, through which action recognition can be solved by an efficient nearest neighbor search by the Hamming distance between the FTA hash codes. Experiments on the public 3D human action datasets shows that the FTA algorithm can reach a recognition accuracy higher than 80 , with about 15 bits per frame considering there are 65 frames per video over the datasets.
We review the related works in two following categories. * Human Action Recognition and Retrieval Modeling temporal structure of video sequences is one of the most challenging problems in human action recognition and has attracted intensive research. Many of the existing approaches focus on extracting the local spatio-temporal features and do not explicitly model the temporal patterns of the action sequence. Most of these works are histogram-based and adopting the bag-of-words framework. For example, in @cite_19 , the bag-of-3D-points from the depth maps are sampled and clustered to model the dynamics of human actions. Similar ideas are presented in @cite_27 , where the Histogram of Gradient (HoG) features are exacted from the depth motion maps to classify human actions. Histogram of 3D joints (HOJ3D) @cite_29 and histogram of visual words @cite_8 are also employed to describe the action sequences by using the joint features. Unfortunately, these histogram-based methods do not preserve the temporal order of the primitive postures of the action and may lead to the poor performance on distinguishing between actions composed of the similar postures but in different temporal orders.
@cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_29 @cite_8
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In this paper, we present a novel approach for human action recognition with histograms of 3D joint locations (HOJ3D) as a compact representation of postures. We extract the 3D skelet al joint locations from Kinect depth maps using 's method [6]. The HOJ3D computed from the action depth sequences are reprojected using LDA and then clustered into k posture visual words, which represent the prototypical poses of actions. The temporal evolutions of those visual words are modeled by discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs). In addition, due to the design of our spherical coordinate system and the robust 3D skeleton estimation from Kinect, our method demonstrates significant view invariance on our 3D action dataset. Our dataset is composed of 200 3D sequences of 10 indoor activities performed by 10 individuals in varied views. Our method is real-time and achieves superior results on the challenging 3D action dataset. We also tested our algorithm on the MSR Action 3D dataset and our algorithm outperforms [25] on most of the cases. This paper presents an approach for human action recognition by finding the discriminative key frames from a video sequence and representing them with the distribution of local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. In this approach, the key frames of the video sequence are selected by their discriminative power and represented by the local motion features detected in them and integrated from their temporal neighbors. In the key frame’s representation, the spatial arrangements of the motion features are captured in a hierarchical spatial pyramid structure. By using frame by frame voting for the recognition, experiments have demonstrated improved performances over most of the other known methods on the popular benchmark data sets. Recognizinghumanactionfromimagesequencesis an appealingyet challengingproblem in computer vision with many applications including motion capture, human-computer interaction, environment control, and security surveillance. In this paper, we focus on recognizing the activities of a person in an image sequence from local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. Our approach is motivated by the recent success of “bag-of-words” model for general object recognition in computer vision[21, 14]. This representation, which is adapted from the text retrieval literature, models the object by the distribution of words from a fixed visual code book, which is usually obtained by vector quantization of local image visual features. However, this method discards the spatial and the temporal relations among these visual features, which could be helpful in object recognition. Addressing this problem, our approach uses a hierarchical representation for the key frames of a given video sequence to integrate information from both the spatial and the temporal domains. We first apply a spatiotemporal feature detector to the video sequence and obtain the local motion features. Then we generate a visual word code book by quantization of the local motion features and assign a word label to each of them. Next we select key frames of the video sequence by their discriminative power. Then, for each key frame, we integrate the visual words from its nearby frames, divide the key frame spatially into finer subdivisions and compute in each cell the histograms of the visual words detected in this key frame and its temporal neighbors. Finally, we concatenate the histograms from all cells and use System theoretic approaches to action recognition model the dynamics of a scene with linear dynamical systems (LDSs) and perform classification using metrics on the space of LDSs, e.g. Binet-Cauchy kernels. However, such approaches are only applicable to time series data living in a Euclidean space, e.g. joint trajectories extracted from motion capture data or feature point trajectories extracted from video. Much of the success of recent object recognition techniques relies on the use of more complex feature descriptors, such as SIFT descriptors or HOG descriptors, which are essentially histograms. Since histograms live in a non-Euclidean space, we can no longer model their temporal evolution with LDSs, nor can we classify them using a metric for LDSs. In this paper, we propose to represent each frame of a video using a histogram of oriented optical flow (HOOF) and to recognize human actions by classifying HOOF time-series. For this purpose, we propose a generalization of the Binet-Cauchy kernels to nonlinear dynamical systems (NLDS) whose output lives in a non-Euclidean space, e.g. the space of histograms. This can be achieved by using kernels defined on the original non-Euclidean space, leading to a well-defined metric for NLDSs. We use these kernels for the classification of actions in video sequences using (HOOF) as the output of the NLDS. We evaluate our approach to recognition of human actions in several scenarios and achieve encouraging results. Abstract Recognizing human actions in video sequences has been a challenging problem in the last few years due to its real-world applications. A lot of action representation approaches have been proposed to improve the action recognition performance. Despite the popularity of local features-based approaches together with “Bag-of-Words” model for action representation, it fails to capture adequate spatial or temporal relationships. In an attempt to overcome this problem, a trajectory-based local representation approaches have been proposed to capture the temporal information. This paper introduces an improvement of trajectory-based human action recognition approaches to capture discriminative temporal relationships. In our approach, we extract trajectories by tracking the detected spatio-temporal interest points named “cuboid features” with matching its SIFT descriptors over the consecutive frames. We, also, propose a linking and exploring method to obtain efficient trajectories for motion representation in realistic conditions. Then the volumes around the trajectories’ points are described to represent human actions based on the Bag-of-Words (BOW) model. Finally, a support vector machine is used to classify human actions. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was evaluated on three popular datasets (KTH, Weizmann and UCF sports). Experimental results showed that the proposed approach yields considerable performance improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches. In this paper, we present a methodology for human action recognition from a sequence of depth maps obtained using Microsoft Kinect. Specifically, we use a Temporal Bag-of-Words model as representation scheme to capture the variation of features across the temporal domain. Our methodology builds the Temporal Bag-of-Words model on top of the spatiotemporal features extracted from interest points. The local spatio-temporal features provide some invariance to scale, viewpoint changes by capturing the local information. In order to make the representation insensitive to temporal sequence misalignment, we propose using the Temporal Bag-of-Words model in a hierarchical manner by recursively partitioning the depth maps sequence into sub-sequences in temporal domain. Classification is done using SVM. We test our algorithm on our own dataset consisting of eight different actions. Temporal dynamics of postures over time is crucial for sequence-based action recognition. Human actions can be represented by the corresponding motions of articulated skeleton. Most of the existing approaches for skeleton based action recognition model the spatial-temporal evolution of actions based on hand-crafted features. As a kind of hierarchically adaptive filter banks, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) performs well in representation learning. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end hierarchical architecture for skeleton based action recognition with CNN. Firstly, we represent a skeleton sequence as a matrix by concatenating the joint coordinates in each instant and arranging those vector representations in a chronological order. Then the matrix is quantified into an image and normalized to handle the variable-length problem. The final image is fed into a CNN model for feature extraction and recognition. For the specific structure of such images, the simple max-pooling plays an important role on spatial feature selection as well as temporal frequency adjustment, which can obtain more discriminative joint information for different actions and meanwhile address the variable-frequency problem. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-art performance with high computational efficiency, especially surpassing the existing result by more than 15 percentage on the challenging ChaLearn gesture recognition dataset. A graph-based method for 3D view-invariant human action recognition is proposed.An action is represented as a sequence of graphs.The vertices can either be tracked skeleton joints or spatio-temporal keypoints.A spectral graph wavelet transform is leveraged to extract features from the graphs.The method is useful for both single- and multi-view action recognition tasks. Display Omitted We present a method for view-invariant action recognition from depth cameras based on graph signal processing techniques. Our framework leverages a novel graph representation of an action as a temporal sequence of graphs, onto which we apply a spectral graph wavelet transform for creating our feature descriptor. We evaluate two view-invariant graph types: skeleton-based and keypoint-based. The skeleton-based descriptor captures the spatial pose of the subject, whereas the keypoint-based is able to capture complementary information about human-object interaction and the shape of the point cloud. We investigate the effectiveness of our method by experiments on five publicly available datasets. By the graph structure, our method captures the temporal interaction between depth map interest points and achieves a 19.8 increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art results for cross-view action recognition, and competing results for frontal-view action recognition and human-object interaction. Namely, our method results in 90.8 accuracy on the cross-view N-UCLA Multiview Action3D dataset and 91.4 accuracy on the challenging MSRAction3D dataset in the cross-subject setting. For human-object interaction, our method achieves 72.3 accuracy on the Online RGBD Action dataset. We also achieve 96.0 and 98.8 accuracy on the MSRActionPairs3D and UCF-Kinect datasets, respectively. Much recent research in human activity recognition has focused on the problem of recognizing simple repetitive (walking, running, waving) and punctual actions (sitting up, opening a door, hugging). However, many interesting human activities are characterized by a complex temporal composition of simple actions. Automatic recognition of such complex actions can benefit from a good understanding of the temporal structures. We present in this paper a framework for modeling motion by exploiting the temporal structure of the human activities. In our framework, we represent activities as temporal compositions of motion segments. We train a discriminative model that encodes a temporal decomposition of video sequences, and appearance models for each motion segment. In recognition, a query video is matched to the model according to the learned appearances and motion segment decomposition. Classification is made based on the quality of matching between the motion segment classifiers and the temporal segments in the query sequence. To validate our approach, we introduce a new dataset of complex Olympic Sports activities. We show that our algorithm performs better than other state of the art methods. In this paper we propose a novel method for human action recognition based on boosted key-frame selection and correlated pyramidal motion feature representations. Instead of using an unsupervised method to detect interest points, a Pyramidal Motion Feature (PMF), which combines optical flow with a biologically inspired feature, is extracted from each frame of a video sequence. The AdaBoost learning algorithm is then applied to select the most discriminative frames from a large feature pool. In this way, we obtain the top-ranked boosted frames of each video sequence as the key frames which carry the most representative motion information. Furthermore, we utilise the correlogram which focuses not only on probabilistic distributions within one frame but also on the temporal relationships of the action sequence. In the classification phase, a Support-Vector Machine (SVM) is adopted as the final classifier for human action recognition. To demonstrate generalizability, our method has been systematically tested on a variety of datasets and shown to be more effective and accurate for action recognition compared to the previous work. We obtain overall accuracies of: 95.5 , 93.7 , and 36.5 with our proposed method on the KTH, the multiview IXMAS and the challenging HMDB51 datasets, respectively. Action recognition with 3D skeleton sequences became popular due to its speed and robustness. The recently proposed convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based methods show a good performance in learning spatio–temporal representations for skeleton sequences. Despite the good recognition accuracy achieved by previous CNN-based methods, there existed two problems that potentially limit the performance. First, previous skeleton representations were generated by chaining joints with a fixed order. The corresponding semantic meaning was unclear and the structural information among the joints was lost. Second, previous models did not have an ability to focus on informative joints. The attention mechanism was important for skeleton-based action recognition because different joints contributed unequally toward the correct recognition. To solve these two problems, we proposed a novel CNN-based method for skeleton-based action recognition. We first redesigned the skeleton representations with a depth-first tree traversal order, which enhanced the semantic meaning of skeleton images and better preserved the associated structural information. We then proposed the general two-branch attention architecture that automatically focused on spatio–temporal key stages and filtered out unreliable joint predictions. Based on the proposed general architecture, we designed a global long-sequence attention network with refined branch structures. Furthermore, in order to adjust the kernel’s spatio–temporal aspect ratios and better capture long-term dependencies, we proposed a sub-sequence attention network (SSAN) that took sub-image sequences as inputs. We showed that the two-branch attention architecture could be combined with the SSAN to further improve the performance. Our experiment results on the NTU RGB+D data set and the SBU kinetic interaction data set outperformed the state of the art. The model was further validated on noisy estimated poses from the subsets of the UCF101 data set and the kinetics data set. Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques. We describe a new approach to transfer knowledge across views for action recognition by using examples from a large collection of unlabelled mocap data. We achieve this by directly matching purely motion based features from videos to mocap. Our approach recovers 3D pose sequences without performing any body part tracking. We use these matches to generate multiple motion projections and thus add view invariance to our action recognition model. We also introduce a closed form solution for approximate non-linear Circulant Temporal Encoding (nCTE), which allows us to efficiently perform the matches in the frequency domain. We test our approach on the challenging unsupervised modality of the IXMAS dataset, and use publicly available motion capture data for matching. Without any additional annotation effort, we are able to significantly outperform the current state of the art. HighlightsEffective method to recognize human actions using 3D skeleton joints.New action feature descriptor, EigenJoints, for action recognition.Accumulated Motion Energy (AME) method to perform informative frames selection.Our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective method to recognize human actions using 3D skeleton joints recovered from 3D depth data of RGBD cameras. We design a new action feature descriptor for action recognition based on differences of skeleton joints, i.e., EigenJoints which combine action information including static posture, motion property, and overall dynamics. Accumulated Motion Energy (AME) is then proposed to perform informative frame selection, which is able to remove noisy frames and reduce computational cost. We employ non-parametric Naive-Bayes-Nearest-Neighbor (NBNN) to classify multiple actions. The experimental results on several challenging datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we investigate how many frames are necessary for our method to perform classification in the scenario of online action recognition. We observe that the first 30-40 frames are sufficient to achieve comparable results to that using the entire video sequences on the MSR Action3D dataset. By extracting spatial and temporal characteristics in one network, the two-stream ConvNets can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in action recognition. However, such a framework typically suffers from the separately processing of spatial and temporal information between the two standalone streams and is hard to capture long-term temporal dependence of an action. More importantly, it is incapable of finding the salient portions of an action, say, the frames that are the most discriminative to identify the action. To address these problems, a oint etwork based ttention (JNA) is proposed in this study. We find that the fully-connected fusion, branch selection and spatial attention mechanism are totally infeasible for action recognition. Thus in our joint network, the spatial and temporal branches share some information during the training stage. We also introduce an attention mechanism on the temporal domain to capture the long-term dependence meanwhile finding the salient portions. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Experimental results show that our method can improve the action recognition performance significantly and achieves the state-of-the-art results on both datasets. This paper presents a new framework for human activity recognition from video sequences captured by a depth camera. We cluster hypersurface normals in a depth sequence to form the polynormal which is used to jointly characterize the local motion and shape information. In order to globally capture the spatial and temporal orders, an adaptive spatio-temporal pyramid is introduced to subdivide a depth video into a set of space-time grids. We then propose a novel scheme of aggregating the low-level polynormals into the super normal vector (SNV) which can be seen as a simplified version of the Fisher kernel representation. In the extensive experiments, we achieve classification results superior to all previous published results on the four public benchmark datasets, i.e., MSRAction3D, MSRDailyActivity3D, MSRGesture3D, and MSRActionPairs3D. This paper introduces a state-of-the-art video representation and applies it to efficient action recognition and detection. We first propose to improve the popular dense trajectory features by explicit camera motion estimation. More specifically, we extract feature point matches between frames using SURF descriptors and dense optical flow. The matches are used to estimate a homography with RANSAC. To improve the robustness of homography estimation, a human detector is employed to remove outlier matches from the human body as human motion is not constrained by the camera. Trajectories consistent with the homography are considered as due to camera motion, and thus removed. We also use the homography to cancel out camera motion from the optical flow. This results in significant improvement on motion-based HOF and MBH descriptors. We further explore the recent Fisher vector as an alternative feature encoding approach to the standard bag-of-words (BOW) histogram, and consider different ways to include spatial layout information in these encodings. We present a large and varied set of evaluations, considering (i) classification of short basic actions on six datasets, (ii) localization of such actions in feature-length movies, and (iii) large-scale recognition of complex events. We find that our improved trajectory features significantly outperform previous dense trajectories, and that Fisher vectors are superior to BOW encodings for video recognition tasks. In all three tasks, we show substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art results. We present a novel unsupervised learning method for human action categories. A video sequence is represented as a collection of spatial-temporal words by extracting space-time interest points. The algorithm automatically learns the probability distributions of the spatial-temporal words and the intermediate topics corresponding to human action categories. This is achieved by using latent topic models such as the probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Our approach can handle noisy feature points arisen from dynamic background and moving cameras due to the application of the probabilistic models. Given a novel video sequence, the algorithm can categorize and localize the human action(s) contained in the video. We test our algorithm on three challenging datasets: the KTH human motion dataset, the Weizmann human action dataset, and a recent dataset of figure skating actions. Our results reflect the promise of such a simple approach. In addition, our algorithm can recognize and localize multiple actions in long and complex video sequences containing multiple motions. This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6 mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding. In this paper we address the problem of modeling and analyzing human motion by focusing on 3D body skeletons. Particularly, our intent is to represent skelet al motion in a geometric and efficient way, leading to an accurate action-recognition system. Here an action is represented by a dynamical system whose observability matrix is characterized as an element of a Grassmann manifold. To formulate our learning algorithm, we propose two distinct ideas: (1) in the first one we perform classification using a Truncated Wrapped Gaussian model, one for each class in its own tangent space. (2) In the second one we propose a novel learning algorithm that uses a vector representation formed by concatenating local coordinates in tangent spaces associated with different classes and training a linear SVM. We evaluate our approaches on three public 3D action datasets: MSR-action 3D, UT-kinect and UCF-kinect datasets; these datasets represent different kinds of challenges and together help provide an exhaustive evaluation. The results show that our approaches either match or exceed state-of-the-art performance reaching 91.21 on MSR-action 3D, 97.91 on UCF-kinect, and 88.5 on UT-kinect. Finally, we evaluate the latency, i.e. the ability to recognize an action before its termination, of our approach and demonstrate improvements relative to other published approaches. HighlightsA human action recognition approach which represents skelet al sequence as point on the Grassmann manifold.A new learning algorithm is introduced for learning human actions.Experiments are performed on three public datasets.Promising success rates are achieved, showing accuracy and better latency performances. Motion capture data digitally represent human movements by sequences of 3D skeleton configurations. Such spatio-temporal data, often recorded in the stream-based nature, need to be efficiently processed to detect high-interest actions, for example, in human-computer interaction to understand hand gestures in real time. Alternatively, automatically annotated parts of a continuous stream can be persistently stored to become searchable, and thus reusable for future retrieval or pattern mining. In this paper, we focus on multi-label detection of user-specified actions in unsegmented sequences as well as continuous streams. In particular, we utilize the current advances in recurrent neural networks and adopt a unidirectional LSTM model to effectively encode the skeleton frames within the hidden network states. The model learns what subsequences of encoded frames belong to the specified action classes within the training phase. The learned representations of classes are then employed within the annotation phase to infer the probability that an incoming skeleton frame belongs to a given action class. The computed probabilities are finally compared against a learned threshold to automatically determine the beginnings and endings of actions. To further enhance the annotation accuracy, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM model to estimate class probabilities by considering not only the past frames but also the future ones. We extensively evaluate both the models on the three use cases of real-time stream annotation, offline annotation of long sequences, and early action detection and prediction. The experiments demonstrate that our models outperform the state of the art in effectiveness and are at least one order of magnitude more efficient, being able to annotate 10 k frames per second.