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Distribution of action movements (DAM): a descriptor for human action recognition

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Abstract

Human action recognition fromskeletal data is an important and active area of research in which the state of the art has not yet achieved near-perfect accuracy on many wellknown datasets. In this paper, we introduce the Distribution of Action Movements Descriptor, a novel action descriptor based on the distribution of the directions of the motions of the joints between frames, over the set of all possible motions in the dataset. The descriptor is computed as a normalized histogram over a set of representative directions of the joints, which are in turn obtained via clustering. While the descriptor is global in the sense that it represents the overall distribution of movement directions of an action, it is able to partially retain its temporal structure by applying a windowing scheme.

The descriptor, together with a standard classifier, outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques on many wellknown datasets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigacion en Informatica III-LIDI, Facultad de Informatica, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, B1900AWX, Argentina

    Franco Ronchetti, Facundo Quiroga, Laura Lanzarini & Cesar Estrebou

Authors
  1. Franco Ronchetti
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  2. Facundo Quiroga
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  3. Laura Lanzarini
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  4. Cesar Estrebou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Franco Ronchetti.

Additional information

Franco Ronchetti is an advanced PhD student in computer science at the School of computer Science of Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. He is a teaching assistant for Grade Courses at the National University of La Plata. His reasearch area is related to soft-computing and intelligent systems, with focus on dynamic problems such as signal processing and pattern recognition.

Facundo Quiroga received his BS in computer science from the Faculty of Informatics of Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina in 2014. He is currently a PhD Student in the same faculty, doing research work at the III-LIDI Institute. His main research fields comprise machine learning and signal processing, with applications in action recognition and biomedical data analysis. He is also interested in computational neuroscience and the interplay between artificial neural networks and biological ones.

Laura Lanzarini is a full-time Head Professor teaching in Data Mining topics since 2001 at the School of Computer Science of Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. She is a Guest Head Professor at the National University of Tierra del Fuego and Guest Professor of the Post-Grade Program at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is interested in subjects pertaining to the design and development of adaptive application based on neural networks, swarm intelligence, and other metaheuristics applicable to Data Mining and Text Mining problems.

Cesar Estrebou is a PhD student in computer vision, image processing and graphic computing at the School of Computer Science of Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. Since 2008, He is a teaching assistant (assignments supervisor) for Grade Courses at the National University of La Plata. He has been carrying out research activities since 2005 at the Institute of Research in Computer Science III-LIDI in areas related to intelligent systems, real-time systems and software engenieering.

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Ronchetti, F., Quiroga, F., Lanzarini, L. et al. Distribution of action movements (DAM): a descriptor for human action recognition. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 956–965 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4320-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4320-x

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