Spatio-Temporal Naive-Bayes Nearest-Neighbor (ST-NBNN) for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Junwu Weng, Chaoqun Weng, Junsong Yuan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 4171-4180

Motivated by previous success of using non-parametric methods to recognize objects, e.g., NBNN, we extend it to recognize actions using skeletons. Each 3D action is presented by a sequence of 3D poses. Similar to NBNN, our proposed Spatio-Temporal-NBNN applies stage-to-class distance to classify actions. However, ST-NBNN takes the spatio-temporal structure of 3D actions into consideration and relaxes the Naive Bayes assumption of NBNN. Specifically, ST-NBNN adopts bilinear classifiers to identify both key temporal stages as well as spatial joints for action classification. Although only using a linear classifier, experiments on three benchmark datasets show that by combining the strength of both non-parametric and parametric models, ST-NBNN can achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art results using sophisticated models such as deep learning. Moreover, by identifying key skeleton joints and temporal stages for each action class, our ST-NBNN can capture the essential spatio-temporal patterns that play key roles of recognizing actions, which is not always achievable by using end-to-end models.