A discussion on the validation tests employed to compare human action recognition methods using the MSR Action3D dataset

This paper aims to determine which is the best human action recognition method based on features extracted from RGB-D devices, such as the Microsoft Kinect. A review of all the papers that make reference to MSR Action3D, the most used dataset that includes depth information acquired from a RGB-D device, has been performed. We found that the validation method used by each work differs from the others. So, a direct comparison among works cannot be made. However, almost all the works present their results comparing them without taking into account this issue. Therefore, we present different rankings according to the methodology used for the validation in orden to clarify the existing confusion.Comment: 16 pages and 7 table

Environmental Sensing by Wearable Device for Indoor Activity and Location Estimation

We present results from a set of experiments in this pilot study to investigate the causal influence of user activity on various environmental parameters monitored by occupant carried multi-purpose sensors. Hypotheses with respect to each type of measurements are verified, including temperature, humidity, and light level collected during eight typical activities: sitting in lab / cubicle, indoor walking / running, resting after physical activity, climbing stairs, taking elevators, and outdoor walking. Our main contribution is the development of features for activity and location recognition based on environmental measurements, which exploit location- and activity-specific characteristics and capture the trends resulted from the underlying physiological process. The features are statistically shown to have good separability and are also information-rich. Fusing environmental sensing together with acceleration is shown to achieve classification accuracy as high as 99.13%. For building applications, this study motivates a sensor fusion paradigm for learning individualized activity, location, and environmental preferences for energy management and user comfort.Comment: submitted to the 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON

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

Multi-Modality Human Action Recognition

Human action recognition is very useful in many applications in various areas, e.g. video surveillance, HCI (Human computer interaction), video retrieval, gaming and security. Recently, human action recognition becomes an active research topic in computer vision and pattern recognition. A number of action recognition approaches have been proposed. However, most of the approaches are designed on the RGB images sequences, where the action data was collected by RGB/intensity camera. Thus the recognition performance is usually related to various occlusion, background, and lighting conditions of the image sequences. If more information can be provided along with the image sequences, more data sources other than the RGB video can be utilized, human actions could be better represented and recognized by the designed computer vision system.;In this dissertation, the multi-modality human action recognition is studied. On one hand, we introduce the study of multi-spectral action recognition, which involves the information from different spectrum beyond visible, e.g. infrared and near infrared. Action recognition in individual spectra is explored and new methods are proposed. Then the cross-spectral action recognition is also investigated and novel approaches are proposed in our work. On the other hand, since the depth imaging technology has made a significant progress recently, where depth information can be captured simultaneously with the RGB videos. The depth-based human action recognition is also investigated. I first propose a method combining different type of depth data to recognize human actions. Then a thorough evaluation is conducted on spatiotemporal interest point (STIP) based features for depth-based action recognition. Finally, I advocate the study of fusing different features for depth-based action analysis. Moreover, human depression recognition is studied by combining facial appearance model as well as facial dynamic model

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: Theories, Tools and Challenges for the Community

In recent years, deep learning (DL), a re-branding of neural networks (NNs), has risen to the top in numerous areas, namely computer vision (CV), speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. Whereas remote sensing (RS) possesses a number of unique challenges, primarily related to sensors and applications, inevitably RS draws from many of the same theories as CV; e.g., statistics, fusion, and machine learning, to name a few. This means that the RS community should be aware of, if not at the leading edge of, of advancements like DL. Herein, we provide the most comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art RS DL research. We also review recent new developments in the DL field that can be used in DL for RS. Namely, we focus on theories, tools and challenges for the RS community. Specifically, we focus on unsolved challenges and opportunities as it relates to (i) inadequate data sets, (ii) human-understandable solutions for modelling physical phenomena, (iii) Big Data, (iv) non-traditional heterogeneous data sources, (v) DL architectures and learning algorithms for spectral, spatial and temporal data, (vi) transfer learning, (vii) an improved theoretical understanding of DL systems, (viii) high barriers to entry, and (ix) training and optimizing the DL.Comment: 64 pages, 411 references. To appear in Journal of Applied Remote Sensin