Explorations of skeleton features for LSTM-based action recognition

Currently RNN-based methods achieve excellent performance on action recognition using skeletons. But the inputs of these approaches are limited to coordinates of joints, and they improve the performance mainly by extending RNN models in different ways and exploring relations of body parts directly from joint coordinates. Our method utilizes a universal spatial model perpendicular to the RNN model enhancement. Specifically, we propose two simple geometric features, inspired by previous work. With experiments on a 3-layer LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework, we find that the geometric relational features based on vectors and normal vectors outperform other methods and achieve state-of-art results on two datasets. Moreover, we show that utilizing our features as input requires less data for training.