Does Human Action Recognition Benefit from Pose Estimation?
Angela Yao, Jüergen Gall, Gabriele Fanelli, Luc Van Gool · 2011
Early works on human action recognition focused on tracking and classifying articulated body motions. Such methods required accurate localisation of body parts, which is a difficult task, particularly under realistic imaging conditions. As such, recent trends have shifted towards the use of more abstract, low-level appearance features such as spatio-temporal interest points. Motivated by the recent progress in pose estimation, we feel that pose-based action recognition systems warrant a second look. In this paper, we address the question of whether pose estimation is useful for action recognition or if it is better to train a classifier only on low-level appearance features drawn from video data. We compare pose-based, appearance-based and combined pose and appearance features for action recognition in a home-monitoring scenario. Our experiments show that pose-based features outperform low-level appearance features, even when heavily corrupted by noise, suggesting that pose estimation is beneficial for the action recognition task. © 2011. The copyright of this document resides with its authors.