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Multi-activity 3D human motion recognition and tracking in composite motion model with synthesized transition bridges

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Abstract

Recognizing and tracking multiple activities are all extremely challenging machine vision tasks due to diverse motion types included and high-dimensional (HD) state space. To overcome these difficulties, a novel generative model called composite motion model (CMM) is proposed. This model contains a set of independent, low-dimensional (LD), and activity-specific manifold models that effectively constrain the state search space for 3D human motion recognition and tracking. This separate modeling of activity-specific movements can not only allow each manifold model to be optimized in accordance with only its respective movement, but also improve the scalability of the models. For accurate tracking with our CMM, a particle filter (PF) method is thus employed and then the particles can be distributed in all manifold models at each time step. In addition, an efficient activity switching strategy is proposed to dominate the particle distribution on all LD manifolds. To diffuse the particles amongst manifold models and respond quickly to the sudden changes in the activity, a set of visually-reasonable and kinematically-realistic transition bridges are synthesized by using the good properties of LD latent space and HD observation space, which enables the inter-activity motions seem more natural and realistic. Finally, a pose hypothesis that can best interpret the visual observation is selected and then used to recognize the activity that is currently observed. Extensive experiments, via qualitative and quantitative analyses, verify the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed CMM in the tasks of multi-activity 3D human motion recognition and tracking.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant: 61202292), and in part by Guangdong Province National Science Foundation of China (Grant: 9151064101000037). The authors thank Sigal L, Balan AO, and Ionescu C for providing publically available databases (i.e., HumanEva and Human3.6 M databases) for free.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China

    Jialin Yu, Jifeng Sun, Shengqing Liu & Shasha Luo

Authors
  1. Jialin Yu
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  2. Jifeng Sun
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  4. Shasha Luo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jialin Yu.

Appendix: Definition of common notations

Appendix: Definition of common notations

Notation

Definition

X

LD latent variable space

Y

HD pose observation space

X

LD pose sequence

Y

HD pose observation sequence

x

LD latent point that corresponds to a 3D pose in LD space X

y

HD pose data in HD space Y

z

Visual observation (i.e., shape contexts in our paper)

c

Activity class

N

Number of activities (or Number of separate models)

f N (·)

A nonlinear mapping from LD latent space X to HD observation space Y

f D (·)

A temporal dynamical mapping from the latent point x t − 1 to another point x t

f x → z

Mapping function to visual observation space

f x → y

Mapping function to pose observation space

t

Frame index

S

Sample poses

\( {\mathbf{s}}^{dri} \)

Particles after drift

\( {\mathbf{s}}^{dis} \)

Particles after diffusion

n

Number of particles

α

Particle weight

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Yu, J., Sun, J., Liu, S. et al. Multi-activity 3D human motion recognition and tracking in composite motion model with synthesized transition bridges. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 12023–12055 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4847-y

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