Human Body Pose Distance Image Analysis for Action Recognition

Abstract

Body pose analysis is an important factor of human action recognition. Recently, the proposed Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and deep ConvNets-based methods are showing good performances in learning sequential information. Despite these good performances, RNN lacks to efficiently learn spatial relation between body parts while deep ConvNets require a huge amount of data for training. We propose a Distance-based Neural Network (DNN) for action recognition in static images. We compute effective distances between a set of body part pairs for a given image and feed to DNN to learn effective representation of complex actions. We also propose Distance-based Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to learn representations from 2D images. The distances are rearranged in 2D grayscale image called as a Distance Image. This 2D representation allows the network to learn specific discriminative information between adjacent pixel distance values corresponding to different body part pairs. We evaluate our method on two real-world datasets i.e. UT-Interaction and SBU Kinect Interaction. Results show that our proposed method achieves better performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.