Online Action Recognition based on Incremental Learning of Weighted Covariance Descriptors

Online action recognition aims to recognize actions from unsegmented streams of data in a continuous manner. One of the challenges in online recognition is the accumulation of evidence for decision making. This paper presents a fast and efficient online method to recognize actions from a stream of noisy skeleton data. The method adopts a covariance descriptor calculated from skeleton data and is based on a novel method developed for incrementally learning the covariance descriptors, referred to as weighted covariance descriptors, so that past frames have less contributions to the descriptor and current frames and informative frames such as key frames contributes more towards the descriptor. The online recognition is achieved using an efficient nearest neighbour search against a set of trained actions. Experimental results on MSRC-12 Kinect Gesture dataset and our newly collocated online action recognition dataset have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed method.