Differential Recurrent Neural Networks for Action Recognition

The long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is capable of processing complex sequential information since it utilizes special gating schemes for learning representations from long input sequences. It has the potential to model any sequential time-series data, where the current hidden state has to be considered in the context of the past hidden states. This property makes LSTM an ideal choice to learn the complex dynamics of various actions. Unfortunately, the conventional LSTMs do not consider the impact of spatio-temporal dynamics corresponding to the given salient motion patterns, when they gate the information that ought to be memorized through time. To address this problem, we propose a differential gating scheme for the LSTM neural network, which emphasizes on the change in information gain caused by the salient motions between the successive frames. This change in information gain is quantified by Derivative of States (DoS), and thus the proposed LSTM model is termed as differential Recurrent Neural Network (dRNN). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model by automatically recognizing actions from the real-world 2D and 3D human action datasets. Our study is one of the first works towards demonstrating the potential of learning complex time-series representations via high-order derivatives of states

Action Recognition Based on Joint Trajectory Maps Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have shown promising performances in many computer vision tasks, especially image-based recognition. How to effectively use ConvNets for video-based recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a compact, effective yet simple method to encode spatio-temporal information carried in $3D$ skeleton sequences into multiple $2D$ images, referred to as Joint Trajectory Maps (JTM), and ConvNets are adopted to exploit the discriminative features for real-time human action recognition. The proposed method has been evaluated on three public benchmarks, i.e., MSRC-12 Kinect gesture dataset (MSRC-12), G3D dataset and UTD multimodal human action dataset (UTD-MHAD) and achieved the state-of-the-art results

Concurrence-Aware Long Short-Term Sub-Memories for Person-Person Action Recognition

Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has become a popular choice to model individual dynamics for single-person action recognition due to its ability of modeling the temporal information in various ranges of dynamic contexts. However, existing RNN models only focus on capturing the temporal dynamics of the person-person interactions by naively combining the activity dynamics of individuals or modeling them as a whole. This neglects the inter-related dynamics of how person-person interactions change over time. To this end, we propose a novel Concurrence-Aware Long Short-Term Sub-Memories (Co-LSTSM) to model the long-term inter-related dynamics between two interacting people on the bounding boxes covering people. Specifically, for each frame, two sub-memory units store individual motion information, while a concurrent LSTM unit selectively integrates and stores inter-related motion information between interacting people from these two sub-memory units via a new co-memory cell. Experimental results on the BIT and UT datasets show the superiority of Co-LSTSM compared with the state-of-the-art methods

Social Scene Understanding: End-to-End Multi-Person Action Localization and Collective Activity Recognition

We present a unified framework for understanding human social behaviors in raw image sequences. Our model jointly detects multiple individuals, infers their social actions, and estimates the collective actions with a single feed-forward pass through a neural network. We propose a single architecture that does not rely on external detection algorithms but rather is trained end-to-end to generate dense proposal maps that are refined via a novel inference scheme. The temporal consistency is handled via a person-level matching Recurrent Neural Network. The complete model takes as input a sequence of frames and outputs detections along with the estimates of individual actions and collective activities. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our algorithm on multiple publicly available benchmarks