Spatial Hierarchy and Temporal Attention Guided Cross Masking for Self-supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition

In self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition, the mask reconstruction paradigm is gaining interest in enhancing model refinement and robustness through effective masking. However, previous works primarily relied on a single masking criterion, resulting in the model overfitting specific features and overlooking other effective information. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchy and attention guided cross-masking framework (HA-CM) that applies masking to skeleton sequences from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Specifically, in spatial graphs, we utilize hyperbolic space to maintain joint distinctions and effectively preserve the hierarchical structure of high-dimensional skeletons, employing joint hierarchy as the masking criterion. In temporal flows, we substitute traditional distance metrics with the global attention of joints for masking, addressing the convergence of distances in high-dimensional space and the lack of a global perspective. Additionally, we incorporate cross-contrast loss based on the cross-masking framework into the loss function to enhance the model's learning of instance-level features. HA-CM shows efficiency and universality on three public large-scale datasets, NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD. The source code of our HA-CM is available at https://github.com/YinxPeng/HA-CM-main.

Joint Temporal Pooling for Improving Skeleton-based Action Recognition

In skeleton-based human action recognition, temporal pooling is a critical step for capturing spatiotemporal relationship of joint dynamics. Conventional pooling methods overlook the preservation of motion information and treat each frame equally. However, in an action sequence, only a few segments of frames carry discriminative information related to the action. This paper presents a novel Joint Motion Adaptive Temporal Pooling (JMAP) method for improving skeleton-based action recognition. Two variants of JMAP, frame-wise pooling and joint-wise pooling, are introduced. The efficacy of JMAP has been validated through experiments on the popular NTU RGB+D 120 and PKU-MMD datasets.

Recovering Complete Actions for Cross-dataset Skeleton Action Recognition

Despite huge progress in skeleton-based action recognition, its generalizability to different domains remains a challenging issue. In this paper, to solve the skeleton action generalization problem, we present a recover-and-resample augmentation framework based on a novel complete action prior. We observe that human daily actions are confronted with temporal mismatch across different datasets, as they are usually partial observations of their complete action sequences. By recovering complete actions and resampling from these full sequences, we can generate strong augmentations for unseen domains. At the same time, we discover the nature of general action completeness within large datasets, indicated by the per-frame diversity over time. This allows us to exploit two assets of transferable knowledge that can be shared across action samples and be helpful for action completion: boundary poses for determining the action start, and linear temporal transforms for capturing global action patterns. Therefore, we formulate the recovering stage as a two-step stochastic action completion with boundary pose-conditioned extrapolation followed by smooth linear transforms. Both the boundary poses and linear transforms can be efficiently learned from the whole dataset via clustering. We validate our approach on a cross-dataset setting with three skeleton action datasets, outperforming other domain generalization approaches by a considerable margin.

CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition

Skeleton-based multi-entity action recognition is a challenging task aiming to identify interactive actions or group activities involving multiple diverse entities. Existing models for individuals often fall short in this task due to the inherent distribution discrepancies among entity skeletons, leading to suboptimal backbone optimization. To this end, we introduce a Convex Hull Adaptive Shift based multi-Entity action recognition method (CHASE), which mitigates inter-entity distribution gaps and unbiases subsequent backbones. Specifically, CHASE comprises a learnable parameterized network and an auxiliary objective. The parameterized network achieves plausible, sample-adaptive repositioning of skeleton sequences through two key components. First, the Implicit Convex Hull Constrained Adaptive Shift ensures that the new origin of the coordinate system is within the skeleton convex hull. Second, the Coefficient Learning Block provides a lightweight parameterization of the mapping from skeleton sequences to their specific coefficients in convex combinations. Moreover, to guide the optimization of this network for discrepancy minimization, we propose the Mini-batch Pair-wise Maximum Mean Discrepancy as the additional objective. CHASE operates as a sample-adaptive normalization method to mitigate inter-entity distribution discrepancies, thereby reducing data bias and improving the subsequent classifier's multi-entity action recognition performance. Extensive experiments on six datasets, including NTU Mutual 11/26, H2O, Assembly101, Collective Activity and Volleyball, consistently verify our approach by seamlessly adapting to single-entity backbones and boosting their performance in multi-entity scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Necolizer/CHASE .

Online hand gesture recognition using Continual Graph Transformers

Online continuous action recognition has emerged as a critical research area due to its practical implications in real-world applications, such as human-computer interaction, healthcare, and robotics. Among various modalities, skeleton-based approaches have gained significant popularity, demonstrating their effectiveness in capturing 3D temporal data while ensuring robustness to environmental variations. However, most existing works focus on segment-based recognition, making them unsuitable for real-time, continuous recognition scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel online recognition system designed for real-time skeleton sequence streaming. Our approach leverages a hybrid architecture combining Spatial Graph Convolutional Networks (S-GCN) for spatial feature extraction and a Transformer-based Graph Encoder (TGE) for capturing temporal dependencies across frames. Additionally, we introduce a continual learning mechanism to enhance model adaptability to evolving data distributions, ensuring robust recognition in dynamic environments. We evaluate our method on the SHREC'21 benchmark dataset, demonstrating its superior performance in online hand gesture recognition. Our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy but also significantly reduces false positive rates, making it a compelling solution for real-time applications. The proposed system can be seamlessly integrated into various domains, including human-robot collaboration and assistive technologies, where natural and intuitive interaction is crucial.

Human Action Recognition (HAR) Using Skeleton-based Quantum Spatial Temporal Relative Transformer Network: ST-RTR

Quantum Human Action Recognition (HAR) is an interesting research area in human-computer interaction used to monitor the activities of elderly and disabled individuals affected by physical and mental health. In the recent era, skeleton-based HAR has received much attention because skeleton data has shown that it can handle changes in striking, body size, camera views, and complex backgrounds. One key characteristic of ST-GCN is automatically learning spatial and temporal patterns from skeleton sequences. It has some limitations, as this method only works for short-range correlation due to its limited receptive field. Consequently, understanding human action requires long-range interconnection. To address this issue, we developed a quantum spatial-temporal relative transformer ST-RTR model. The ST-RTR includes joint and relay nodes, which allow efficient communication and data transmission within the network. These nodes help to break the inherent spatial and temporal skeleton topologies, which enables the model to understand long-range human action better. Furthermore, we combine quantum ST-RTR with a fusion model for further performance improvements. To assess the performance of the quantum ST-RTR method, we conducted experiments on three skeleton-based HAR benchmarks: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and UAV-Human. It boosted CS and CV by 2.11 % and 1.45% on NTU RGB+D 60, 1.25% and 1.05% on NTU RGB+D 120. On UAV-Human datasets, accuracy improved by 2.54%. The experimental outcomes explain that the proposed ST-RTR model significantly improves action recognition associated with the standard ST-GCN method.

MV-GMN: State Space Model for Multi-View Action Recognition

Recent advancements in multi-view action recognition have largely relied on Transformer-based models. While effective and adaptable, these models often require substantial computational resources, especially in scenarios with multiple views and multiple temporal sequences. Addressing this limitation, this paper introduces the MV-GMN model, a state-space model specifically designed to efficiently aggregate multi-modal data (RGB and skeleton), multi-view perspectives, and multi-temporal information for action recognition with reduced computational complexity. The MV-GMN model employs an innovative Multi-View Graph Mamba network comprising a series of MV-GMN blocks. Each block includes a proposed Bidirectional State Space Block and a GCN module. The Bidirectional State Space Block introduces four scanning strategies, including view-prioritized and time-prioritized approaches. The GCN module leverages rule-based and KNN-based methods to construct the graph network, effectively integrating features from different viewpoints and temporal instances. Demonstrating its efficacy, MV-GMN outperforms the state-of-the-arts on several datasets, achieving notable accuracies of 97.3\% and 96.7\% on the NTU RGB+D 120 dataset in cross-subject and cross-view scenarios, respectively. MV-GMN also surpasses Transformer-based baselines while requiring only linear inference complexity, underscoring the model's ability to reduce computational load and enhance the scalability and applicability of multi-view action recognition technologies.

Multi-Modality Co-Learning for Efficient Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has garnered significant attention due to the utilization of concise and resilient skeletons. Nevertheless, the absence of detailed body information in skeletons restricts performance, while other multimodal methods require substantial inference resources and are inefficient when using multimodal data during both training and inference stages. To address this and fully harness the complementary multimodal features, we propose a novel multi-modality co-learning (MMCL) framework by leveraging the multimodal large language models (LLMs) as auxiliary networks for efficient skeleton-based action recognition, which engages in multi-modality co-learning during the training stage and keeps efficiency by employing only concise skeletons in inference. Our MMCL framework primarily consists of two modules. First, the Feature Alignment Module (FAM) extracts rich RGB features from video frames and aligns them with global skeleton features via contrastive learning. Second, the Feature Refinement Module (FRM) uses RGB images with temporal information and text instruction to generate instructive features based on the powerful generalization of multimodal LLMs. These instructive text features will further refine the classification scores and the refined scores will enhance the model's robustness and generalization in a manner similar to soft labels. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and Northwestern-UCLA benchmarks consistently verify the effectiveness of our MMCL, which outperforms the existing skeleton-based action recognition methods. Meanwhile, experiments on UTD-MHAD and SYSU-Action datasets demonstrate the commendable generalization of our MMCL in zero-shot and domain-adaptive action recognition. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/liujf69/MMCL-Action.

LORTSAR: Low-Rank Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

The complexity of state-of-the-art Transformer-based models for skeleton-based action recognition poses significant challenges in terms of computational efficiency and resource utilization. In this paper, we explore the application of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to effectively reduce the model sizes of these pre-trained models, aiming to minimize their resource consumption while preserving accuracy. Our method, LORTSAR (LOw-Rank Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition), also includes a fine-tuning step to compensate for any potential accuracy degradation caused by model compression, and is applied to two leading Transformer-based models, "Hyperformer" and "STEP-CATFormer". Experimental results on the "NTU RGB+D" and "NTU RGB+D 120" datasets show that our method can reduce the number of model parameters substantially with negligible degradation or even performance increase in recognition accuracy. This confirms that SVD combined with post-compression fine-tuning can boost model efficiency, paving the way for more sustainable, lightweight, and high-performance technologies in human action recognition.

Expressive Keypoints for Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Skeleton Transformation

In the realm of skeleton-based action recognition, the traditional methods which rely on coarse body keypoints fall short of capturing subtle human actions. In this work, we propose Expressive Keypoints that incorporates hand and foot details to form a fine-grained skeletal representation, improving the discriminative ability for existing models in discerning intricate actions. To efficiently model Expressive Keypoints, the Skeleton Transformation strategy is presented to gradually downsample the keypoints and prioritize prominent joints by allocating the importance weights. Additionally, a plug-and-play Instance Pooling module is exploited to extend our approach to multi-person scenarios without surging computation costs. Extensive experimental results over seven datasets present the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-art for skeleton-based human action recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/YijieYang23/SkeleT-GCN.