NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding

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: http://rose1.ntu.edu.sg/Datasets/actionRecognition.asp]Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI

3D 손 포즈 인식을 위한 인조 데이터의 이용

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(지능형융합시스템전공), 2021.8. 양한열.3D hand pose estimation (HPE) based on RGB images has been studied for a long time. Relevant methods have focused mainly on optimization of neural framework for graphically connected finger joints. Training RGB-based HPE models has not been easy to train because of the scarcity on RGB hand pose datasets; unlike human body pose datasets, the finger joints that span hand postures are structured delicately and exquisitely. Such structure makes accurately annotating each joint with unique 3D world coordinates difficult, which is why many conventional methods rely on synthetic data samples to cover large variations of hand postures. Synthetic dataset consists of very precise annotations of ground truths, and further allows control over the variety of data samples, yielding a learning model to be trained with a large pose space. Most of the studies, however, have performed frame-by-frame estimation based on independent static images. Synthetic visual data can provide practically infinite diversity and rich labels, while avoiding ethical issues with privacy and bias. However, for many tasks, current models trained on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data. The task of 3D human hand pose estimation is a particularly interesting example of this synthetic-to-real problem, because learning-based approaches perform reasonably well given real training data, yet labeled 3D poses are extremely difficult to obtain in the wild, limiting scalability. In this dissertation, we attempt to not only consider the appearance of a hand but incorporate the temporal movement information of a hand in motion into the learning framework for better 3D hand pose estimation performance, which leads to the necessity of a large scale dataset with sequential RGB hand images. We propose a novel method that generates a synthetic dataset that mimics natural human hand movements by re-engineering annotations of an extant static hand pose dataset into pose-flows. With the generated dataset, we train a newly proposed recurrent framework, exploiting visuo-temporal features from sequential images of synthetic hands in motion and emphasizing temporal smoothness of estimations with a temporal consistency constraint. Our novel training strategy of detaching the recurrent layer of the framework during domain finetuning from synthetic to real allows preservation of the visuo-temporal features learned from sequential synthetic hand images. Hand poses that are sequentially estimated consequently produce natural and smooth hand movements which lead to more robust estimations. We show that utilizing temporal information for 3D hand pose estimation significantly enhances general pose estimations by outperforming state-of-the-art methods in experiments on hand pose estimation benchmarks. Since a fixed set of dataset provides a finite distribution of data samples, the generalization of a learning pose estimation network is limited in terms of pose, RGB and viewpoint spaces. We further propose to augment the data automatically such that the augmented pose sampling is performed in favor of training pose estimators generalization performance. Such auto-augmentation of poses is performed within a learning feature space in order to avoid computational burden of generating synthetic sample for every iteration of updates. The proposed effort can be considered as generating and utilizing synthetic samples for network training in the feature space. This allows training efficiency by requiring less number of real data samples, enhanced generalization power over multiple dataset domains and estimation performance caused by efficient augmentation.2D 이미지에서 사람의 손 모양과 포즈를 인식하고 구현흐는 연구는 각 손가락 조인트들의 3D 위치를 검출하는 것을 목표로한다. 손 포즈는 손가락 조인트들로 구성되어 있고 손목 관절부터 MCP, PIP, DIP 조인트들로 사람 손을 구성하는 신체적 요소들을 의미한다. 손 포즈 정보는 다양한 분야에서 활용될수 있고 손 제스쳐 감지 연구 분야에서 손 포즈 정보가 매우 훌륭한 입력 특징 값으로 사용된다. 사람의 손 포즈 검출 연구를 실제 시스템에 적용하기 위해서는 높은 정확도, 실시간성, 다양한 기기에 사용 가능하도록 가벼운 모델이 필요하고, 이것을 가능케 하기 위해서 학습한 인공신경망 모델을 학습하는데에는 많은 데이터가 필요로 한다. 하지만 사람 손 포즈를 측정하는 기계들이 꽤 불안정하고, 이 기계들을 장착하고 있는 이미지는 사람 손 피부 색과는 많이 달라 학습에 사용하기가 적절하지 않다. 그러기 때문에 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해 인공적으로 만들어낸 데이터를 재가공 및 증량하여 학습에 사용하고, 그것을 통해 더 좋은 학습성과를 이루려고 한다. 인공적으로 만들어낸 사람 손 이미지 데이터들은 실제 사람 손 피부색과는 비슷할지언정 디테일한 텍스쳐가 많이 달라, 실제로 인공 데이터를 학습한 모델은 실제 손 데이터에서 성능이 현저히 많이 떨어진다. 이 두 데이타의 도메인을 줄이기 위해서 첫번째로는 사람손의 구조를 먼저 학습 시키기위해, 손 모션을 재가공하여 그 움직임 구조를 학스한 시간적 정보를 뺀 나머지만 실제 손 이미지 데이터에 학습하였고 크게 효과를 내었다. 이때 실제 사람 손모션을 모방하는 방법론을 제시하였다. 두번째로는 두 도메인이 다른 데이터를 네트워크 피쳐 공간에서 align시켰다. 그뿐만아니라 인공 포즈를 특정 데이터들로 augment하지 않고 네트워크가 많이 보지 못한 포즈가 만들어지도록 하나의 확률 모델로서 설정하여 그것에서 샘플링하는 구조를 제안하였다. 본 논문에서는 인공 데이터를 더 효과적으로 사용하여 annotation이 어려운 실제 데이터를 더 모으는 수고스러움 없이 인공 데이터들을 더 효과적으로 만들어 내는 것 뿐만 아니라, 더 안전하고 지역적 특징과 시간적 특징을 활용해서 포즈의 성능을 개선하는 방법들을 제안했다. 또한, 네트워크가 스스로 필요한 데이터를 찾아서 학습할수 있는 자동 데이터 증량 방법론도 함께 제안하였다. 이렇게 제안된 방법을 결합해서 더 나은 손 포즈의 성능을 향상 할 수 있다.1. Introduction 1 2. Related Works 14 3. Preliminaries: 3D Hand Mesh Model 27 4. SeqHAND: RGB-sequence-based 3D Hand Pose and Shape Estimation 31 5. Hand Pose Auto-Augment 66 6. Conclusion 85 Abstract (Korea) 101 감사의 글 103박

An original framework for understanding human actions and body language by using deep neural networks

The evolution of both fields of Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has allowed the development of efficient automatic systems for the analysis of people's behaviour. By studying hand movements it is possible to recognize gestures, often used by people to communicate information in a non-verbal way. These gestures can also be used to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. In particular, sign language and semaphoric hand gestures are the two foremost areas of interest due to their importance in Human-Human Communication (HHC) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), respectively. While the processing of body movements play a key role in the action recognition and affective computing fields. The former is essential to understand how people act in an environment, while the latter tries to interpret people's emotions based on their poses and movements; both are essential tasks in many computer vision applications, including event recognition, and video surveillance. In this Ph.D. thesis, an original framework for understanding Actions and body language is presented. The framework is composed of three main modules: in the first one, a Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs) based method for the Recognition of Sign Language and Semaphoric Hand Gestures is proposed; the second module presents a solution based on 2D skeleton and two-branch stacked LSTM-RNNs for action recognition in video sequences; finally, in the last module, a solution for basic non-acted emotion recognition by using 3D skeleton and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is provided. The performances of RNN-LSTMs are explored in depth, due to their ability to model the long term contextual information of temporal sequences, making them suitable for analysing body movements. All the modules were tested by using challenging datasets, well known in the state of the art, showing remarkable results compared to the current literature methods