Simplex-Based 3D Spatio-Temporal Feature Description for Action Recognition

We present a novel feature description algorithm to describe 3D local spatio-temporal features for human action recognition. Our descriptor avoids the singularity and limited discrimination power issues of traditional 3D descriptors by quantizing and describing visual features in the simplex topological vector space. Specifically, given a feature's support region containing a set of 3D visual cues, we decompose the cues' orientation into three angles, transform the decomposed angles into the simplex space, and describe them in such a space. Then, quadrant decomposition is performed to improve discrimination, and a final feature vector is composed from the resulting histograms. We develop intuitive visualization tools for analyzing feature characteristics in the simplex topological vector space. Experimental results demonstrate that our novel simplex-based orientation decomposition (SOD) descriptor substantially outperforms traditional 3D descriptors for the KTH, UCF Sport, and Hollywood-2 benchmark action datasets. In addition, the results show that our SOD descriptor is a superior individual descriptor for action recognition.