Human Activity Classification with Online Growing Neural Gas

In this paper we present an online approach to human activity classification based on Online Growing Neural Gas (OGNG). In contrast to state-of-the-art approaches that perform training in an offline fashion, our approach is online in the sense that it circumvents the need to store any training examples, processing the data on the fly and in one pass. The approach is thus particularly suitable in life-long learning settings where never-ending streams of data arise. We propose an architecture that consists of two layers, allowing the storage of human actions in a more memory efficient structure. While the first layer (feature map) dynamically clusters Space-Time Interest Points (STIP) and serves as basis for the creation of histogram-based signatures of human actions, the second layer (class map) builds a classification model that relies on these human action signatures. We present experimental results on the KTH activity dataset showing that our approach has comparable performance to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) while performing online and avoiding to store examples explicitly.