Pose-based human action recognition via sparse representation in dissimilarity space

Human actions can be considered as a sequence of body poses over time, usually represented by coordinates corresponding to human skeleton models. Recently, a variety of low-cost devices have been released, able to produce markerless real time pose estimation. Nevertheless, limitations of the incorporated RGB-D sensors can produce inaccuracies, necessitating the utilization of alternative representation and classification schemes in order to boost performance. In this context, we propose a method for action recognition where skeletal data are initially processed in order to obtain robust and invariant pose representations and then vectors of dissimilarities to a set of prototype actions are computed. The task of recognition is performed in the dissimilarity space using sparse representation. A new publicly available dataset is introduced in this paper, created for evaluation purposes. The proposed method was also evaluated on other public datasets, and the results are compared to those of similar methods. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.