Decoupling GCN with DropGraph Module for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

In skeleton-based action recognition, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable success. Nevertheless, how to efficiently model the spatial-temporal skeleton graph without introducing extra computation burden is a challenging problem for industrial deployment. In this paper, we rethink the spatial aggregation in existing GCN-based skeleton action recognition methods and discover that they are limited by coupling aggregation mechanism. Inspired by the decoupling aggregation mechanism in CNNs, we propose decoupling GCN to boost the graph modeling ability with no extra computation, no extra latency, no extra GPU memory cost, and less than 10% extra parameters. Another prevalent problem of GCNs is over-fitting. Although dropout is a widely used regularization technique, it is not effective for GCNs, due to the fact that activation units are correlated between neighbor nodes. We propose DropGraph to discard features in correlated nodes, which is particularly effective on GCNs. Moreover, we introduce an attention-guided drop mechanism to enhance the regularization effect. All our contributions introduce zero extra computation burden at deployment. We conduct experiments on three datasets (NTU-RGBD, NTU-RGBD-120, and Northwestern-UCLA) and exceed the state-of-the-art performance with less computation cost.