Effective human action recognition using global and local offsets of skeleton joints

Human action recognition based on 3D skeleton joints is an important yet challenging task. While many research work are devoted to 3D action recognition, they mainly suffer from two problems: complex model representation and low implementation efficiency. To tackle these problems, we propose an effective and efficient framework for 3D action recognition using a global-and-local histogram representation model. Our method consists of a global-and-local featuring phase, a saturation based histogram representation phase, and a classification phase. The global-and-local featuring phase captures the global feature and local feature of each action sequence using the joint displacement between the current frame and the first frame, and the joint displacement between pairwise fixed-skip frames, respectively. The saturation based histogram representation phase captures the histogram representation of each joint considering the motion independence of joints and saturation of each histogram bin. The classification phase measures the distance of each joint histogram-to-class. Besides, we produce a novel action dataset called BJUT Kinect dataset, which consists of multi-period motion clips and intra-class variations. We compare our method with many state-of-the-art methods on BJUT Kinect dataset, UCF Kinect dataset, Florence 3D action dataset, MSR-Action3D dataset, and NTU RGB+D Dataset. The results show that our method achieves both higher accuracy and efficiency for 3D action recognition.