Investigation of Different Skeleton Features for CNN-based 3D Action Recognition

Deep learning techniques are being used in skeleton based action recognition tasks and outstanding performance has been reported. Compared with RNN based methods which tend to overemphasize temporal information, CNN-based approaches can jointly capture spatio-temporal information from texture color images encoded from skeleton sequences. There are several skeleton-based features that have proven effective in RNN-based and handcrafted-feature-based methods. However, it remains unknown whether they are suitable for CNN-based approaches. This paper proposes to encode five spatial skeleton features into images with different encoding methods. In addition, the performance implication of different joints used for feature extraction is studied. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D dataset for 3D human action analysis. An accuracy of 75.32\% was achieved in Large Scale 3D Human Activity Analysis Challenge in Depth Videos

Deep Affordance-grounded Sensorimotor Object Recognition

It is well-established by cognitive neuroscience that human perception of objects constitutes a complex process, where object appearance information is combined with evidence about the so-called object "affordances", namely the types of actions that humans typically perform when interacting with them. This fact has recently motivated the "sensorimotor" approach to the challenging task of automatic object recognition, where both information sources are fused to improve robustness. In this work, the aforementioned paradigm is adopted, surpassing current limitations of sensorimotor object recognition research. Specifically, the deep learning paradigm is introduced to the problem for the first time, developing a number of novel neuro-biologically and neuro-physiologically inspired architectures that utilize state-of-the-art neural networks for fusing the available information sources in multiple ways. The proposed methods are evaluated using a large RGB-D corpus, which is specifically collected for the task of sensorimotor object recognition and is made publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of affordance information to object recognition, achieving an up to 29% relative error reduction by its inclusion.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, dataset link included, accepted to CVPR 201