RPAN: An End-to-End Recurrent Pose-Attention Network for Action Recognition in Videos

Recent studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for action recognition in videos. However, previous works mainly utilize video-level category as supervision to train RNNs, which may prohibit RNNs to learn complex motion structures along time. In this paper, we propose a recurrent pose-attention network (RPAN) to address this challenge, where we introduce a novel pose-attention mechanism to adaptively learn pose-related features at every time-step action prediction of RNNs. More specifically, we make three main contributions in this paper. Firstly, unlike previous works on pose-related action recognition, our RPAN is an end-to-end recurrent network which can exploit important spatial-temporal evolutions of human pose to assist action recognition in a unified framework. Secondly, instead of learning individual human-joint features separately, our pose-attention mechanism learns robust human-part features by sharing attention parameters partially on the semantically-related human joints. These human-part features are then fed into the human-part pooling layer to construct a highly-discriminative pose-related representation for temporal action modeling. Thirdly, one important byproduct of our RPAN is pose estimation in videos, which can be used for coarse pose annotation in action videos. We evaluate the proposed RPAN quantitatively and qualitatively on two popular benchmarks, i.e., Sub-JHMDB and PennAction. Experimental results show that RPAN outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods on these challenging datasets.