Learning silhouette dynamics for human action recognition

In this paper, we address the problem of recognizing human actions with motion dynamics alone. For this purpose, we propose to use silhouette sequences to represent the human actions by discarding the appearance information, and then model the sequences with linear dynamical systems (LDSs). Recognition is achieved by directly comparing the distance between LDSs, rather than resorting to complex Bayesian learning and inference. In particular, we introduce an efficient optimization method to learn robust LDSs, and develop a shift invariant distance metric to measure the similarity on the LDSs space. We evaluate our approach on the human action data set and achieve comparable results.