Space-time shapelets for action recognition

Abstract

Recent works in action recognition have begun to treat actions as space-time volumes. This allows actions to be converted into 3-D shapes, thus converting the problem into that of volumetric matching. However, the special nature of the temporal dimension and the lack of intuitive volumetric features makes the problem both challenging and interesting. In a data-driven and bottom-up approach, we propose a dictionary of mid-level features called Space-Time Shapelets.1 This dictionary tries to characterize the space of local space-time shapes, or equivalently local motion patterns formed by the actions. Representing an action as a bag of these space-time patterns allows us to reduce the combinatorial space of these volumes, become robust to partial occlusions and errors in extracting spatial support. The proposed method is computationally efficient and achieves competitive results on a standard dataset [5].