Action-OOD: An End-to-End Skeleton-Based Model for Robust Out-of-Distribution Human Action Detection

Human action recognition is a crucial task in computer vision systems. However, in real-world scenarios, human actions often fall outside the distribution of training data, requiring a model to both recognize in-distribution (ID) actions and reject out-of-distribution (OOD) ones. Despite its importance, there has been limited research on OOD detection in human actions. Existing works on OOD detection mainly focus on image data with RGB structure, and many methods are post-hoc in nature. While these methods are convenient and computationally efficient, they often lack sufficient accuracy and fail to consider the presence of OOD samples. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end skeleton-based model called Action-OOD, specifically designed for OOD human action detection. Unlike some existing approaches that may require prior knowledge of existing OOD data distribution, our model solely utilizes in-distribution (ID) data during the training stage, effectively mitigating the overconfidence issue prevalent in OOD detection. We introduce an attention-based feature fusion block, which enhances the model's capability to recognize unknown classes while preserving classification accuracy for known classes. Further, we present a novel energy-based loss function and successfully integrate it with the traditional cross-entropy loss to maximize the separation of data distributions between ID and OOD. Through extensive experiments conducted on NTU-RGB+D 60, NTU-RGB+D 120, and Kinetics-400 datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of classic OOD detection techniques in the context of skeleton-based action recognition tasks, offering promising avenues for future research in this field. Code will be available at: https://github.com/YilliaJing/Action-OOD.git.