Robust Pose Features for Action Recognition

We propose the use of a robust pose feature based on part based human detectors (Poselets) for the task of action recognition in relatively unconstrained videos, i.e., collected from the web. This feature, based on the original poselets activation vector, coarsely models pose and its transitions over time. Our main contributions are that we improve the original feature's compactness and discriminability by greedy set cover over subsets of joint configurations, and incorporate it into a unified video-based action recognition framework. Experiments shows that the pose feature alone is extremely informative, yielding performance that matches most state-of-the-art approaches but only using our proposed improvements to its compactness and discriminability. By combining our pose feature with motion and shape, we outperform state-of-the-art approaches on two public datasets.