Human action recognition using Pose-based discriminant embedding

Manifold learning is an efficient approach for recognizing human actions. Most of the previous embedding methods are learned based on the distances between frames as data points. Thus they may be efficient in the frame recognition framework, but they will not guarantee to give optimum results when sequences are to be classified as in the case of action recognition in which temporal constraints convey important information. In the sequence recognition framework, sequences are compared based on the distances defined between sets of points. Among them Spatio-temporal Correlation Distance (SCD) is an efficient measure for comparing ordered sequences. In this paper we propose a novel embedding which is optimum in the sequence recognition framework based on SCD as the distance measure. Specifically, the proposed embedding minimizes the sum of the distances between intra-class sequences while seeking to maximize the sum of distances between inter-class points. Action sequences are represented by key poses chosen equidistantly from one action period. The action period is computed by a modified correlation-based method. Action recognition is achieved by comparing the projected sequences in the low-dimensional subspace using SCD or Hausdorff distance in a nearest neighbor framework. Several experiments are carried out on three popular datasets. The method is shown not only to classify the actions efficiently obtaining results comparable to the state of the art on all datasets, but also to be robust to additive noise and tolerant to occlusion, deformation and change in view point. Moreover, the method outperforms other classical dimension reduction techniques and performs faster by choosing less number of postures.