Human action recognition using three orthogonal planes with unsupervised deep convolutional neural network

Deep learning models have attained great success for an extensive range of computer vision applications including image and video classification. However, the complex architecture of the most recently developed networks imposes certain memory and computational resource limitations, especially for human action recognition applications. Unsupervised deep convolutional neural networks such as PCANet can alleviate these limitations and hence significantly reduce the computational complexity of the whole recognition system. In this work, instead of using 3D convolutional neural network architecture to learn temporal features of video actions, the unsupervised convolutional PCANet model is extended into (PCANet-TOP) which effectively learn spatiotemporal features from Three Orthogonal Planes (TOP). For each video sequence, spatial frames (XY) and temporal planes (XT and YT) are utilized to train three different PCANet models. Then, the learned features are fused after reducing their dimensionality using whitening PCA to obtain spatiotemporal feature representation of the action video. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied for action classification process. The proposed method is evaluated on four benchmarks and well-known datasets, namely, Weizmann, KTH, UCF Sports, and YouTube action datasets. The recognition results show that the proposed PCANet-TOP provides discriminative and complementary features using three orthogonal planes and able to achieve promising and comparable results with state-of-the-art methods.