3D real-time human action recognition using a spline interpolation approach

This paper presents a novel descriptor based on skeleton information provided by RGB-D videos for human action recognition. These features are obtained, considering the motion as continuous trajectories of skeleton joints. With the discrete information of skeleton joints position, a cubic-spline interpolation is applied to joints position, velocity and acceleration components. The training and classification steps are done using a linear SVM. In the literature, many human motion descriptors based on RGB-D cameras had already been proposed with good accuracy, but with a high computational time. The main interest of this proposed approach is its ability to calculate human motion descriptors with a low computation cost while such a descriptor leads to an acceptable accuracy of recognition. Thus, this approach can be adapted to human computer interaction applications. For the purpose of validation, we apply our method to the challenging benchmark MSR-Action3D and introduce a new indicator which is the ratio between accuracy and execution time per descriptor. Using this criterion, we show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-art methods in terms of the combined information of rapidity and accuracy.