Human skeleton joints are popular for action analysis since they can be easily extracted from videos to discard background noises. However, current skeleton representations do not fully benefit from machine learning with CNNs. We propose "Skepxels" a spatio-temporal representation for skeleton sequences to fully exploit the "local" correlations between joints using the 2D convolution kernels of CNN. We transform skeleton videos into images of flexible dimensions using Skepxels and develop a CNN-based framework for effective human action recognition using the resulting images. Skepxels encode rich spatio-temporal information about the skeleton joints in the frames by maximizing a unique distance metric, defined collaboratively over the distinct joint arrangements used in the skelet al image. Moreover, they are flexible in encoding compound semantic notions such as location and speed of the joints. The proposed action recognition exploits the representation in a hierarchical manner by first capturing the micro-temporal relations between the skeleton joints with the Skepxels and then exploiting their macro-temporal relations by computing the Fourier Temporal Pyramids over the CNN features of the skelet al images. We extend the Inception-ResNet CNN architecture with the proposed method and improve the state-of-the-art accuracy by 4.4 on the large scale NTU human activity dataset. On the medium-sized N-UCLA and UTH-MHAD datasets, our method outperforms the existing results by 5.7 and 9.3 respectively.
In recent years, skeleton-based action recognition has become a popular 3D classification problem. State-of-the-art methods typically first represent each motion sequence as a high-dimensional trajectory on a Lie group with an additional dynamic time warping, and then shallowly learn favorable Lie group features. In this paper we incorporate the Lie group structure into a deep network architecture to learn more appropriate Lie group features for 3D action recognition. Within the network structure, we design rotation mapping layers to transform the input Lie group features into desirable ones, which are aligned better in the temporal domain. To reduce the high feature dimensionality, the architecture is equipped with rotation pooling layers for the elements on the Lie group. Furthermore, we propose a logarithm mapping layer to map the resulting manifold data into a tangent space that facilitates the application of regular output layers for the final classification. Evaluations of the proposed network for standard 3D human action recognition datasets clearly demonstrate its superiority over existing shallow Lie group feature learning methods as well as most conventional deep learning methods. 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.