A survey on video-based Human Action Recognition: recent updates, datasets, challenges, and applications

Human Action Recognition (HAR) involves human activity monitoring task in different areas of medical, education, entertainment, visual surveillance, video retrieval, as well as abnormal activity identification, to name a few. Due to an increase in the usage of cameras, automated systems are in demand for the classification of such activities using computationally intelligent techniques such as Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). In this survey, we have discussed various ML and DL techniques for HAR for the years 2011-2019. The paper discusses the characteristics of public datasets used for HAR. It also presents a survey of various action recognition techniques along with the HAR applications namely, content-based video summarization, human-computer interaction, education, healthcare, video surveillance, abnormal activity detection, sports, and entertainment. The advantages and disadvantages of action representation, dimensionality reduction, and action analysis methods are also provided. The paper discusses challenges and future directions for HAR.