Rolling Rotations for Recognizing Human Actions from 3D Skeletal Data

Recently, skeleton-based human action recognition has been receiving significant attention from various research communities due to the availability of depth sensors and real-time depth-based 3D skeleton estimation algorithms. In this work, we use rolling maps for recognizing human actions from 3D skeletal data. The rolling map is a well-defined mathematical concept that has not been explored much by the vision community. First, we represent each skeleton using the relative 3D rotations between various body parts. Since 3D rotations are members of the special orthogonal group SO
₃
, our skeletal representation becomes a point in the Lie group SO
₃
× ... × SO
₃
, which is also a Riemannian manifold. Then, using this representation, we model human actions as curves in this Lie group. Since classification of curves in this non-Euclidean space is a difficult task, we unwrap the action curves onto the Lie algebra so
₃
× ... × so
₃
(which is a vector space) by combining the logarithm map with rolling maps, and perform classification in the Lie algebra. Experimental results on three action datasets show that the proposed approach performs equally well or better when compared to state-of-the-art.