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.

RGB-D-based Action Recognition Datasets: A Survey

Human action recognition from RGB-D (Red, Green, Blue and Depth) data has attracted increasing attention since the first work reported in 2010. Over this period, many benchmark datasets have been created to facilitate the development and evaluation of new algorithms. This raises the question of which dataset to select and how to use it in providing a fair and objective comparative evaluation against state-of-the-art methods. To address this issue, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the most commonly used action recognition related RGB-D video datasets, including 27 single-view datasets, 10 multi-view datasets, and 7 multi-person datasets. The detailed information and analysis of these datasets is a useful resource in guiding insightful selection of datasets for future research. In addition, the issues with current algorithm evaluation vis-\'{a}-vis limitations of the available datasets and evaluation protocols are also highlighted; resulting in a number of recommendations for collection of new datasets and use of evaluation protocols.