A Deep Sequence Learning Framework for Action Recognition in Small-Scale Depth Video Dataset

Depth video sequence-based deep models for recognizing human actions are scarce compared to RGB and skeleton video sequences-based models. This scarcity limits the research advancements based on depth data, as training deep models with small-scale data is challenging. In this work, we propose a sequence classification deep model using depth video data for scenarios when the video data are limited. Unlike summarizing the frame contents of each frame into a single class, our method can directly classify a depth video, i.e., a sequence of depth frames. Firstly, the proposed system transforms an input depth video into three sequences of multi-view temporal motion frames. Together with the three temporal motion sequences, the input depth frame sequence offers a four-stream representation of the input depth action video. Next, the DenseNet121 architecture is employed along with ImageNet pre-trained weights to extract the discriminating frame-level action features of depth and temporal motion frames. The extracted four sets of feature vectors about frames of four streams are fed into four bi-directional (BLSTM) networks. The temporal features are further analyzed through multi-head self-attention (MHSA) to capture multi-view sequence correlations. Finally, the concatenated genre of their outputs is processed through dense layers to classify the input depth video. The experimental results on two small-scale benchmark depth datasets, MSRAction3D and DHA, demonstrate that the proposed framework is efficacious even for insufficient training samples and superior to the existing depth data-based action recognition methods.