ABSTRACT
We present a deep learning-based multitask framework for joint 3D human pose estimation and action recognition from RGB sensors using simple cameras. The approach proceeds along two stages. In the first, a real-time 2D pose detector is run to determine the precise pixel location of important keypoints of the human body. A two-stream deep neural network is then designed and trained to map detected 2D keypoints into 3D poses. In the second stage, the Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) algorithm is deployed to find an optimal network architecture that is used for modeling the spatio-temporal evolution of the estimated 3D poses via an image-based intermediate representation and performing action recognition. Experiments on Human3.6M, MSR Action3D and SBU Kinect Interaction datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the targeted tasks. Moreover, we show that the method requires a low computational budget for training and inference. In particular, the experimental results show that by using a monocular RGB sensor, we can develop a 3D pose estimation and human action recognition approach that reaches the performance of RGB-depth sensors. This opens up many opportunities for leveraging RGB cameras (which are much cheaper than depth cameras and extensively deployed in private and public places) to build intelligent recognition systems.
ABSTRACT
Designing motion representations for 3D human action recognition from skeleton sequences is an important yet challenging task. An effective representation should be robust to noise, invariant to viewpoint changes and result in a good performance with low-computational demand. Two main challenges in this task include how to efficiently represent spatio-temporal patterns of skeletal movements and how to learn their discriminative features for classification tasks. This paper presents a novel skeleton-based representation and a deep learning framework for 3D action recognition using RGB-D sensors. We propose to build an action map called SPMF (Skeleton Posture-Motion Feature), which is a compact image representation built from skeleton poses and their motions. An Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE) algorithm is then applied on the SPMF to enhance their local patterns and form an enhanced action map, namely Enhanced-SPMF. For learning and classification tasks, we exploit Deep Convolutional Neural Networks based on the DenseNet architecture to learn directly an end-to-end mapping between input skeleton sequences and their action labels via the Enhanced-SPMFs. The proposed method is evaluated on four challenging benchmark datasets, including both individual actions, interactions, multiview and large-scale datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on all benchmark tasks, whilst requiring low computational time for training and inference.
