Recently, mid-level features have shown promising performance in computer vision. Mid-level features learned by incorporating class-level information are potentially more discriminative than traditional low-level local features. In this paper, an effective method is proposed to extract mid-level features from Kinect skeletons for 3D human action recognition. Firstly, the orientations of limbs connected by two skeleton joints are computed and each orientation is encoded into one of the 27 states indicating the spatial relationship of the joints. Secondly, limbs are combined into parts and the limb's states are mapped into part states. Finally, frequent pattern mining is employed to mine the most frequent and relevant (discriminative, representative and non-redundant) states of parts in continuous several frames. These parts are referred to as Frequent Local Parts or FLPs. The FLPs allow us to build powerful bag-of-FLP-based action representation. This new representation yields state-of-the-art results on MSR DailyActivity3D and MSR ActionPairs3D.
@cite_11: 
@cite_10: This paper presents a method to recognize human actions from sequences of depth maps. Specifically, we employ an action graph to model explicitly the dynamics of the actions and a bag of 3D points to characterize a set of salient postures that correspond to the nodes in the action graph. In addition, we propose a simple, but effective projection based sampling scheme to sample the bag of 3D points from the depth maps. Experimental results have shown that over 90 recognition accuracy were achieved by sampling only about 1 3D points from the depth maps. Compared to the 2D silhouette based recognition, the recognition errors were halved. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of the bag of points posture model to deal with occlusions through simulation.
@cite_8: This paper presents a graphical model for learning and recognizing human actions. Specifically, we propose to encode actions in a weighted directed graph, referred to as action graph, where nodes of the graph represent salient postures that are used to characterize the actions and are shared by all actions. The weight between two nodes measures the transitional probability between the two postures represented by the two nodes. An action is encoded as one or multiple paths in the action graph. The salient postures are modeled using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). Both the salient postures and action graph are automatically learned from training samples through unsupervised clustering and expectation and maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed action graph not only performs effective and robust recognition of actions, but it can also be expanded efficiently with new actions. An algorithm is also proposed for adding a new action to a trained action graph without compromising the existing action graph. Extensive experiments on widely used and challenging data sets have verified the performance of the proposed methods, its tolerance to noise and viewpoints, its robustness across different subjects and data sets, as well as the effectiveness of the algorithm for learning new actions.
The process of action recognition can be generally divided into two main steps, action representation and action classification. Action representation consists of feature extraction and feature selection. Features can be extracted from input sources such as depth maps, skeleton and or RGB images. Regardless of the input source, there are two main approaches, space-time approach and sequential approach @cite_8 @cite_10 @cite_11 , to the representation of actions. The space-time approach usually extracts local or holistic features from space-time volume, without explicit modelling of temporal dynamics. By contrast, the sequential approach normally extracts local features from each frame of the input source and models the dynamics explicitly. Action classification is the step of learning a classifier based on action representation and classifying any new observations using the classifier. For space-time approaches, discriminative classifier, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), is often used for classification. For the sequential approach, generative statistical models, such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM), are commonly used. Our method belongs to the skeleton-based space-time volume approach. In this section, we mainly review the existing work of skeleton-based action representation for action recognition.