In this paper, we describe a simple strategy for mitigating variability in temporal data series by shifting focus onto long-term, frequency domain features that are less susceptible to variability. We apply this method to the human action recognition task and demonstrate how working in the frequency domain can yield good recognition features for commonly used optical flow and articulated pose features, which are highly sensitive to small differences in motion, viewpoint, dynamic backgrounds, occlusion and other sources of variability. We show how these frequency-based features can be used in combination with a simple forest classifier to achieve good and robust results on the popular KTH Actions dataset.
This paper presents a method to recognize human actions from sequences of depth maps. Specifically, we employ an action graph to model explicitly the dynamics of the actions and a bag of 3D points to characterize a set of salient postures that correspond to the nodes in the action graph. In addition, we propose a simple, but effective projection based sampling scheme to sample the bag of 3D points from the depth maps. Experimental results have shown that over 90 recognition accuracy were achieved by sampling only about 1 3D points from the depth maps. Compared to the 2D silhouette based recognition, the recognition errors were halved. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of the bag of points posture model to deal with occlusions through simulation. Human action recognition is an important yet challenging task. The recently developed commodity depth sensors open up new possibilities of dealing with this problem but also present some unique challenges. The depth maps captured by the depth cameras are very noisy and the 3D positions of the tracked joints may be completely wrong if serious occlusions occur, which increases the intra-class variations in the actions. In this paper, an actionlet ensemble model is learnt to represent each action and to capture the intra-class variance. In addition, novel features that are suitable for depth data are proposed. They are robust to noise, invariant to translational and temporal misalignments, and capable of characterizing both the human motion and the human-object interactions. The proposed approach is evaluated on two challenging action recognition datasets captured by commodity depth cameras, and another dataset captured by a MoCap system. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to the state of the art algorithms. 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. A new method for representing and recognizing human body movements is presented. The basic idea is to identify sets of constraints that are diagnostic of a movement: expressed using body-centered coordinates such as joint angles and in force only during a particular movement. Assuming the availability of Cartesian tracking data, we develop techniques for a representation of movements defined by space curves in subspaces of a "phase space." The phase space has axes of joint angles and torso location and attitude, and the axes of the subspaces are subsets of the axes of the phase space. Using this representation we develop a system for learning new movements from ground truth data by searching for constraints. We then use the learned representation for recognizing movements in unsegmented data. We train and test the system on nine fundamental steps from classical ballet performed by two dancers; the system accurately recognizes the movements in the unsegmented stream of motion. > Being able to detect and recognize human activities is essential for several applications, including personal assistive robotics. In this paper, we perform detection and recognition of unstructured human activity in unstructured environments. We use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and compute a set of features based on human pose and motion, as well as based on image and point-cloud information. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM), which considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities. We infer the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve good performance even when the person was not seen before in the training set.1 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. One of the fundamental challenges of recognizing actions is accounting for the variability that arises when arbitrary cameras capture humans performing actions. In this paper, we explicitly identify three important sources of variability: (1) viewpoint, (2) execution rate, and (3) anthropometry of actors, and propose a model of human actions that allows us to investigate all three. Our hypothesis is that the variability associated with the execution of an action can be closely approximated by a linear combination of action bases in joint spatio-temporal space. We demonstrate that such a model bounds the rank of a matrix of image measurements and that this bound can be used to achieve recognition of actions based only on imaged data. A test employing principal angles between subspaces that is robust to statistical fluctuations in measurement data is presented to find the membership of an instance of an action. The algorithm is applied to recognize several actions, and promising results have been obtained.