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

Transforming spatio-temporal self-attention using action embedding for skeleton-based action recognition

Over the past few years, skeleton-based action recognition has attracted great success because the skeleton data is immune to illumination variation, view-point variation, background clutter, scaling, and camera motion. However, effective modeling of the latent information of skeleton data is still a challenging problem. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel idea of action embedding with a self-attention Transformer network for skeleton-based action recognition. Our proposed technology mainly comprises of two modules as, i) action embedding and ii) self-attention Transformer. The action embedding encodes the relationship between corresponding body joints (e.g., joints of both hands move together for performing clapping action) and thus captures the spatial features of joints. Meanwhile, temporal features and dependencies of body joints are modeled using Transformer architecture. Our method works in a single-stream (end-to-end) fashion, where MLP is used for classification. We carry out an ablation study and evaluate the performance of our model on a small-scale SYSU-3D dataset and large-scale NTU-RGB+D and NTU-RGB+D 120 datasets where the results establish that our method performs better than other state-of-the-art architectures.publishedVersio

Deep Autoencoder for Combined Human Pose Estimation and body Model Upscaling

We present a method for simultaneously estimating 3D human pose and body shape from a sparse set of wide-baseline camera views. We train a symmetric convolutional autoencoder with a dual loss that enforces learning of a latent representation that encodes skeletal joint positions, and at the same time learns a deep representation of volumetric body shape. We harness the latter to up-scale input volumetric data by a factor of $4 \times$, whilst recovering a 3D estimate of joint positions with equal or greater accuracy than the state of the art. Inference runs in real-time (25 fps) and has the potential for passive human behaviour monitoring where there is a requirement for high fidelity estimation of human body shape and pose

HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN

Predicting and understanding human motion dynamics has many applications, such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, and autonomous vehicles. Due to the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), there has been much interest in probabilistic estimation and synthetic data generation using deep neural network architectures and learning algorithms. We propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model for probabilistic human motion prediction, trained with a modified version of improved Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (WGAN-GP), in which we use a custom loss function designed for human motion prediction. Our model, which we call HP-GAN, learns a probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from the same input sequence but a different vector z drawn from a random distribution. Furthermore, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that learns the probability that a given skeleton sequence is a real human motion. We test our algorithm on two of the largest skeleton datasets: NTURGB-D and Human3.6M. We train our model on both single and multiple action types. Its predictive power for long-term motion estimation is demonstrated by generating multiple plausible futures of more than 30 frames from just 10 frames of input. We show that most sequences generated from the same input have more than 50\% probabilities of being judged as a real human sequence. We will release all the code used in this paper to Github