3D human action segmentation and recognition using pose kinetic energy

Human action recognition is challenging, due to large temporal and spatial variations in actions performed by humans. These variations include significant nonlinear temporal stretching. In this paper, we propose an intuitively simple method to extract action templates from 3D human joint data that is insensitive to nonlinear stretching. The extracted action templates are used as the training instances of the actions to train multiple classifiers including a multi-class SVM classifier. Given an unknown action, we first extract and classify all its constituent atomic actions and then assign the action label via an equal voting scheme. We have tested the method on two public datasets that contain 3D human skeleton data. The experimental results show the proposed method can obtain a comparable or better performance than published state-of-the-art methods. Additional experiments also demonstrate the method works robustly on randomly stretched actions.