Analysis and Evaluation of Kinect-based Action Recognition Algorithms

Human action recognition still exists many challenging problems such as different viewpoints, occlusion, lighting conditions, human body size and the speed of action execution, although it has been widely used in different areas. To tackle these challenges, the Kinect depth sensor has been developed to record real time depth sequences, which are insensitive to the color of human clothes and illumination conditions. Many methods on recognizing human action have been reported in the literature such as HON4D, HOPC, RBD and HDG, which use the 4D surface normals, pointclouds, skeleton-based model and depth gradients respectively to capture discriminative information from depth videos or skeleton data. In this research project, the performance of four aforementioned algorithms will be analyzed and evaluated using five benchmark datasets, which cover challenging issues such as noise, change of viewpoints, background clutters and occlusions. We also implemented and improved the HDG algorithm, and applied it in cross-view action recognition using the UWA3D Multiview Activity dataset. Moreover, we used different combinations of individual feature vectors in HDG for performance evaluation. The experimental results show that our improvement of HDG outperforms other three state-of-the-art algorithms for cross-view action recognition.