Learning to Recognize Human Actions From Noisy Skeleton Data Via Noise Adaptation

Recent studies have made great progress on skeleton-based action recognition. However, most of them are developed with relatively clean skeletons without the presence of intensive noise. We argue that the models learned from relatively clean data are not well generalizable to handle noisy skeletons commonly appeared in the real world. In this paper, we address the challenge of recognizing human actions from noisy skeletons, which is seldom explored by previous methods. Beyond exploring the new problem, we further take a new perspective to address it, i.e., noise adaptation, which gets rid of explicit skeleton noise modeling and reliance on skeleton ground truths. Specifically, we develop regression-based and generation-based adaptation models according to whether pairs of noisy skeletons are available. The regression-based model aims to learn noise-suppressed intrinsic feature representations by mapping pairs of noisy skeletons into a noise-robust space. When only unpaired skeletons are accessible, the generation-based model aims to adapt the features from noisy skeletons to a low-noise space by adversarial learning. To verify our proposed model and facilitate research on noisy skeletons, we collect a new dataset Noisy Skeleton Dataset (NSD), the skeletons of which are with much noise and more similar to daily-life data than previous datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted on the NSD, VV-RGBD and N-UCLA datasets, and results consistently show the outstanding performance of our proposed model.