Research on depth-based human activity analysis achieved outstanding performance and demonstrated the effectiveness of 3D representation for action recognition. The existing depth-based and RGB+D-based action recognition benchmarks have a number of limitations, including the lack of large-scale training samples, realistic number of distinct class categories, diversity in camera views, varied environmental conditions, and variety of human subjects. In this work, we introduce a large-scale dataset for RGB+D human action recognition, which is collected from 106 distinct subjects and contains more than 114 thousand video samples and 8 million frames. This dataset contains 120 different action classes including daily, mutual, and health-related activities. We evaluate the performance of a series of existing 3D activity analysis methods on this dataset, and show the advantage of applying deep learning methods for 3D-based human action recognition. Furthermore, we investigate a novel one-shot 3D activity recognition problem on our dataset, and a simple yet effective Action-Part Semantic Relevance-aware (APSR) framework is proposed for this task, which yields promising results for recognition of the novel action classes. We believe the introduction of this large-scale dataset will enable the community to apply, adapt, and develop various data-hungry learning techniques for depth-based and RGB+D-based human activity understanding. [The dataset is available at: this http URL]
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.