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Silhouette-based human action recognition using SAX-Shapes

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Abstract

Human action recognition is an important problem in Computer Vision. Although most of the existing solutions provide good accuracy results, the methods are often overly complex and computationally expensive, hindering practical applications. In this regard, we introduce the combination of time-series representation for the silhouette and Symbolic Aggregate approXimation (SAX), which we refer to as SAX-Shapes, to address the problem of human action recognition. Given an action sequence, the extracted silhouettes of an actor from every frame are transformed into time series. Each of these time series is then efficiently converted into the symbolic vector: SAX. The set of all these SAX vectors (SAX-Shape) represents the action. We propose a rotation invariant distance function to be used by a random forest algorithm to perform the human action recognition. Requiring only silhouettes of actors, the proposed method is validated on two public datasets. It has an accuracy comparable to the related works and it performs well even in varying rotation.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by University of Sharjah (Project 120227).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Imran N. Junejo & Zaher Al Aghbari

  2. Department of Computer Science, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan

    Khurrum Nazir Junejo

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  1. Imran N. Junejo
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  2. Khurrum Nazir Junejo
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  3. Zaher Al Aghbari
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Correspondence to Imran N. Junejo.

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Junejo, I.N., Junejo, K.N. & Aghbari, Z.A. Silhouette-based human action recognition using SAX-Shapes. Vis Comput 30, 259–269 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0842-0

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