Human Action Recognition based on Spectral Domain Features

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel approach towards human action recognition using spectral domain feature extraction. Action representations can be considered as image templates, which can be useful for understanding various actions or gestures as well as for recognition and analysis. An action recognition scheme is developed based on extracting spectral features from the frames of a video sequence using the two-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (2D-DFT). The proposed spectral feature selection algorithm offers the advantage of very low feature dimensionality and thus lower computational cost. We show that using frequency domain features enhances the distinguishability of different actions, resulting in high within-class compactness and between-class separability of the extracted features, while certain undesirable phenomena, such as camera movement and change in camera distance, are less severe in the frequency domain. Principal component analysis is performed to further reduce the dimensionality of the feature space. Experimental results on a benchmark action recognition database confirm that our proposed method offers not only computational savings but also a high degree of accuracy.