Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition

CVPR 2022  ยท  Haodong Duan, Yue Zhao, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai ยท

Human skeleton, as a compact representation of human action, has received increasing attention in recent years. Many skeleton-based action recognition methods adopt graph convolutional networks (GCN) to extract features on top of human skeletons. Despite the positive results shown in previous works, GCN-based methods are subject to limitations in robustness, interoperability, and scalability. In this work, we propose PoseC3D, a new approach to skeleton-based action recognition, which relies on a 3D heatmap stack instead of a graph sequence as the base representation of human skeletons. Compared to GCN-based methods, PoseC3D is more effective in learning spatiotemporal features, more robust against pose estimation noises, and generalizes better in cross-dataset settings. Also, PoseC3D can handle multiple-person scenarios without additional computation cost, and its features can be easily integrated with other modalities at early fusion stages, which provides a great design space to further boost the performance. On four challenging datasets, PoseC3D consistently obtains superior performance, when used alone on skeletons and in combination with the RGB modality.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
3D Action Recognition Assembly101 RGBPoseConv3D Actions Top-1 33.61 # 3
Verbs Top-1 61.99 # 5
Object Top-1 42.90 # 3
Skeleton Based Action Recognition Kinetics-Skeleton dataset PoseC3D Accuracy 47.7 # 4
Skeleton Based Action Recognition Kinetics-Skeleton dataset PoseC3D (SlowOnly-346) Accuracy 49.1 # 3
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D [3D Heatmap] Accuracy (CV) 97.1 # 12
Accuracy (CS) 94.1 # 2
Ensembled Modalities 2 # 1
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (CS) 97.0 # 1
Accuracy (CV) 99.6 # 1
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (w. HRNet 2D Skeleton) Accuracy (Cross-Subject) 86.9 # 27
Accuracy (Cross-Setup) 90.3 # 18
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (Cross-Subject) 96.4 # 1
Accuracy (Cross-Setup) 95.3 # 1
Action Recognition Volleyball PoseC3D (Pose Only) Accuracy 91.3 # 1
Group Activity Recognition Volleyball PoseC3D (Pose-Only) Accuracy 91.3 # 7

Methods