Histogram of Oriented Principal Components for Cross-View Action Recognition

Existing techniques for 3D action recognition are sensitive to viewpoint variations because they extract features from depth images which are viewpoint dependent. In contrast, we directly process point clouds for cross-view action recognition from unknown and unseen views. We propose the histogram of oriented principal components (HOPC) descriptor that is robust to noise, viewpoint, scale and action speed variations. At a 3D point, HOPC is computed by projecting the three scaled eigenvectors of the pointcloud within its local spatio-temporal support volume onto the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. HOPC is also used for the detection of spatiotemporal keypoints (STK) in 3D pointcloud sequences so that view-invariant STK descriptors (or Local HOPC descriptors) at these key locations only are used for action recognition. We also propose a global descriptor computed from the normalized spatio-temporal distribution of STKs in 4-D, which we refer to as STK-D. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed descriptors against nine existing techniques on two cross-view and three single-view human action recognition datasets. The experimental results show that our techniques provide significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.