Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Ziyu Liu, Hongwen Zhang, Zhenghao Chen, Zhiyong Wang, Wanli Ouyang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 143-152

Abstract


Spatial-temporal graphs have been widely used by skeleton-based action recognition algorithms to model human action dynamics. To capture robust movement patterns from these graphs, long-range and multi-scale context aggregation and spatial-temporal dependency modeling are critical aspects of a powerful feature extractor. However, existing methods have limitations in achieving (1) unbiased long-range joint relationship modeling under multi-scale operators and (2) unobstructed cross-spacetime information flow for capturing complex spatial-temporal dependencies. In this work, we present (1) a simple method to disentangle multi-scale graph convolutions and (2) a unified spatial-temporal graph convolutional operator named G3D. The proposed multi-scale aggregation scheme disentangles the importance of nodes in different neighborhoods for effective long-range modeling. The proposed G3D module leverages dense cross-spacetime edges as skip connections for direct information propagation across the spatial-temporal graph. By coupling these proposals, we develop a powerful feature extractor named MS-G3D based on which our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale datasets: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and Kinetics Skeleton 400.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Liu_2020_CVPR,
author = {Liu, Ziyu and Zhang, Hongwen and Chen, Zhenghao and Wang, Zhiyong and Ouyang, Wanli},
title = {Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2020}
}