Human action recognition by SOM considering the probability of spatio-temporal features

In this paper, an action recognition system was invented by proposing a compact 3D descriptor to represent action information, and employing self-organizing map (SOM) to learn and recognize actions. Histogram Of Gradient 3D (HOG3D) performed better among currently used descriptors for action recognition. However, the calculation of the descriptor is quite complex. Furthermore, it used a vector with 960 elements to describe one interest point. Therefore, we proposed a compact descriptor, which shortened the support region of interest points, combined symmetric bins after orientation quantization. In addition, the top value bin of quantized vector was kept instead of setting threshold experimentally. Comparing with HOG3D, our descriptor used 80 bins to describe a point, which reduced much computation complexity. The compact descriptor was used to learn and recognize actions considering the probability of local features in SOM, and the results showed that our system outperformed others both on KTH and Hollywood datasets.