Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey

Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics, domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey, touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the reader

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

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

Action recognition from RGB-D data

In recent years, action recognition based on RGB-D data has attracted increasing attention. Different from traditional 2D action recognition, RGB-D data contains extra depth and skeleton modalities. Different modalities have their own characteristics. This thesis presents seven novel methods to take advantages of the three modalities for action recognition. First, effective handcrafted features are designed and frequent pattern mining method is employed to mine the most discriminative, representative and nonredundant features for skeleton-based action recognition. Second, to take advantages of powerful Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets), it is proposed to represent spatio-temporal information carried in 3D skeleton sequences in three 2D images by encoding the joint trajectories and their dynamics into color distribution in the images, and ConvNets are adopted to learn the discriminative features for human action recognition. Third, for depth-based action recognition, three strategies of data augmentation are proposed to apply ConvNets to small training datasets. Forth, to take full advantage of the 3D structural information offered in the depth modality and its being insensitive to illumination variations, three simple, compact yet effective images-based representations are proposed and ConvNets are adopted for feature extraction and classification. However, both of previous two methods are sensitive to noise and could not differentiate well fine-grained actions. Fifth, it is proposed to represent a depth map sequence into three pairs of structured dynamic images at body, part and joint levels respectively through bidirectional rank pooling to deal with the issue. The structured dynamic image preserves the spatial-temporal information, enhances the structure information across both body parts/joints and different temporal scales, and takes advantages of ConvNets for action recognition. Sixth, it is proposed to extract and use scene flow for action recognition from RGB and depth data. Last, to exploit the joint information in multi-modal features arising from heterogeneous sources (RGB, depth), it is proposed to cooperatively train a single ConvNet (referred to as c-ConvNet) on both RGB features and depth features, and deeply aggregate the two modalities to achieve robust action recognition