View-invariant action recognition using latent kernelized structural SVM

Abstract

This paper goes beyond recognizing human actions from a fixed view and focuses on action recognition from an arbitrary view. A novel learning algorithm, called latent kernelized structural SVM, is proposed for the view-invariant action recognition, which extends the kernelized structural SVM framework to include latent variables. Due to the changing and frequently unknown positions of the camera, we regard the view label of action as a latent variable and implicitly infer it during both learning and inference. Motivated by the geometric correlation between different views and semantic correlation between different action classes, we additionally propose a mid-level correlation feature which describes an action video by a set of decision values from the pre-learned classifiers of all the action classes from all the views. Each decision value captures both geometric and semantic correlations between the action video and the corresponding action class from the corresponding view. After that, we combine the low-level visual cue, mid-level correlation description, and high-level label information into a novel nonlinear kernel under the latent kernelized structural SVM framework. Extensive experiments on multi-view IXMAS and MuHAVi action datasets demonstrate that our method generally achieves higher recognition accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.