Learning structured behaviour models using variable length Markov models

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the modelling and recognition of human activities involving highly structured and semantically rich behaviour such as dance, aerobics, and sign language. A novel approach is presented for automatically acquiring stochastic models of the high-level structure of an activity without the assumption of any prior knowledge. The process involves temporal segmentation into plausible atomic behaviour components and the use of variable length Markov models for the efficient representation of behaviours. Experimental results are presented which demonstrate the generation of realistic sample behaviours and evaluate the performance of models for long-term temporal prediction.