A Novel Feature-Selection Method for Human Activity Recognition in Videos

Abstract

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is the process of identifying human actions in a specific environment. Recognizing human activities from video streams is a challenging task due to problems such as background noise, partial occlusion, changes in scale, orientation, lighting, and the unstable capturing process. Such multi-dimensional and none-linear process increases the complexity, making traditional solutions inefficient in terms of several performance indicators such as accuracy, time, and memory. This paper proposes a technique to select a set of representative features that can accurately recognize human activities from video streams, while minimizing the recognition time and memory. The extracted features are projected on a canvas, which keeps the synchronization property of the spatiotemporal information. The proposed technique is developed to select the features that refer only to progression of changes. The original RGB frames are preprocessed using background subtraction to extract the subject. Then the activity pattern is extracted through the proposed Growth method. Three experiments were conducted; the first experiment was a baseline to compare the classification task using the original RGB features. The second experiment relied on classifying activities using the proposed feature-selection method. Finally, the third experiment provided a sensitivity analysis that compares between the effect of both techniques on time and memory resources. The results indicated that the proposed method outperformed original RBG feature-selection method in terms of accuracy, time, and memory requirements.