In video-based action recognition, viewpoint variations often pose major challenges because the same actions can appear different from different views. We use the complementary RGB and Depth information from the RGB-D cameras to address this problem. The proposed technique capitalizes on the spatio-temporal information available in the two data streams to the extract action features that are largely insensitive to the viewpoint variations. We use the RGB data to compute dense trajectories that are translated to viewpoint insensitive deep features under a non-linear knowledge transfer model. Similarly, the Depth stream is used to extract CNN-based view invariant features on which Fourier Temporal Pyramid is computed to incorporate the temporal information. The heterogeneous features from the two streams are combined and used as a dictionary to predict the label of the test samples. To that end, we propose a sparse-dense collaborative representation classification scheme that strikes a balance between the discriminative abilities of the dense and the sparse representations of the samples over the extracted heterogeneous dictionary.
In RGB video based action recognition, few exiting approaches @cite_18 @cite_29 @cite_20 directly use geometric transformations to incorporate the much needed viewpoint invariance. However, to achieve the desired performance level, it is critical for these methods to accurately estimate the skeleton joints. In practical conditions, it is often challenging to achieve high level of accuracy in skeleton joint estimation, which makes these methods less appealing for the practical purpose. Another stream of techniques @cite_3 @cite_23 @cite_40 @cite_30 exploits spatio-temporal features in the RGB videos to incorporate the viewpoint invariance. Nevertheless, the action recognition performance of these approaches is generally limited by the structure of the extracted features @cite_39 .
@cite_30 @cite_18 @cite_29 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_40 @cite_23 @cite_20
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Action recognition is an important and challenging topic in computer vision, with many important applications including video surveillance, automated cinematography and understanding of social interaction. Yet, most current work in gesture or action interpretation remains rooted in view-dependent representations. This paper introduces Motion History Volumes (MHV) as a free-viewpoint representation for human actions in the case of multiple calibrated, and background-subtracted, video cameras. We present algorithms for computing, aligning and comparing MHVs of different actions performed by different people in a variety of viewpoints. Alignment and comparisons are performed efficiently using Fourier transforms in cylindrical coordinates around the vertical axis. Results indicate that this representation can be used to learn and recognize basic human action classes, independently of gender, body size and viewpoint. 3D human pose recovery is considered as a fundamental step in view-invariant human action recognition. However, inferring 3D poses from a single view usually is slow due to the large number of parameters that need to be estimated and recovered poses are often ambiguous due to the perspective projection. We present an approach that does not explicitly infer 3D pose at each frame. Instead, from existing action models we search for a series of actions that best match the input sequence. In our approach, each action is modeled as a series of synthetic 2D human poses rendered from a wide range of viewpoints. The constraints on transition of the synthetic poses is represented by a graph model called Action Net. Given the input, silhouette matching between the input frames and the key poses is performed first using an enhanced Pyramid Match Kernel algorithm. The best matched sequence of actions is then tracked using the Viterbi algorithm. We demonstrate this approach on a challenging video sets consisting of 15 complex action classes. In this paper, we address the problem of learning compact, view-independent, realistic 3D models of human actions recorded with multiple cameras, for the purpose of recognizing those same actions from a single or few cameras, without prior knowledge about the relative orientations between the cameras and the subjects. To this aim, we propose a new framework where we model actions using three dimensional occupancy grids, built from multiple viewpoints, in an exemplar-based HMM. The novelty is, that a 3D reconstruction is not required during the recognition phase, instead learned 3D exemplars are used to produce 2D image information that is compared to the observations. Parameters that describe image projections are added as latent variables in the recognition process. In addition, the temporal Markov dependency applied to view parameters allows them to evolve during recognition as with a smoothly moving camera. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated with experiments on real datasets and with challenging recognition scenarios. Human activity recognition is central to many practical applications, ranging from visual surveillance to gaming interfacing. Most approaches addressing this problem are based on localized spatio-temporal features that can vary significantly when the viewpoint changes. As a result, their performances rapidly deteriorate as the difference between the viewpoints of the training and testing data increases. In this paper, we introduce a new type of feature, the “Hankelet” that captures dynamic properties of short tracklets. While Hankelets do not carry any spatial information, they bring invariant properties to changes in viewpoint that allow for robust cross-view activity recognition, i.e. when actions are recognized using a classifier trained on data from a different viewpoint. Our experiments on the IXMAS dataset show that using Hanklets improves the state of the art performance by over 20 . We propose a human pose representation model that transfers human poses acquired from different unknown views to a view-invariant high-level space. The model is a deep convolutional neural network and requires a large corpus of multiview training data which is very expensive to acquire. Therefore, we propose a method to generate this data by fitting synthetic 3D human models to real motion capture data and rendering the human poses from numerous viewpoints. While learning the CNN model, we do not use action labels but only the pose labels after clustering all training poses into k clusters. The proposed model is able to generalize to real depth images of unseen poses without the need for re-training or fine-tuning. Real depth videos are passed through the model frame-wise to extract viewinvariant features. For spatio-temporal representation, we propose group sparse Fourier Temporal Pyramid which robustly encodes the action specific most discriminative output features of the proposed human pose model. Experiments on two multiview and three single-view benchmark datasets show that the proposed method dramatically outperforms existing state-of-the-art in action recognition. Analysis of human perception of motion shows that information for representing the motion is obtained from the dramatic changes in the speed and direction of the trajectory. In this paper, we present a computational representation of human action to capture these dramatic changes using spatio-temporal curvature of 2-D trajectory. This representation is compact, view-invariant, and is capable of explaining an action in terms of meaningful action units called dynamic instants and intervals. A dynamic instant is an instantaneous entity that occurs for only one frame, and represents an important change in the motion characteristics. An interval represents the time period between two dynamic instants during which the motion characteristics do not change. Starting without a model, we use this representation for recognition and incremental learning of human actions. The proposed method can discover instances of the same action performed by different people from different view points. Experiments on 47 actions performed by 7 individuals in an environment with no constraints shows the robustness of the proposed method. This paper presents an approach for viewpoint invariant human action recognition, an area that has received scant attention so far, relative to the overall body of work in human action recognition. It has been established previously that there exist no invariants for 3D to 2D projection. However, there exist a wealth of techniques in 2D invariance that can be used to advantage in 3D to 2D projection. We exploit these techniques and model actions in terms of view-invariant canonical body poses and trajectories in 2D invariance space, leading to a simple and effective way to represent and recognize human actions from a general viewpoint. We first evaluate the approach theoretically and show why a straightforward application of the 2D invariance idea will not work. We describe strategies designed to overcome inherent problems in the straightforward approach and outline the recognition algorithm. We then present results on 2D projections of publicly available human motion capture data as well on manually segmented real image sequences. In addition to robustness to viewpoint change, the approach is robust enough to handle different people, minor variabilities in a given action, and the speed of aciton (and hence, frame-rate) while encoding sufficient distinction among actions.