Human activity recognition based on human shape dynamics

Human activity recognition based on human shape dynamics was investigated in this paper. The shape dynamics describe the spatial-temporal shape deformation of a human body during its movement and thus provide important information about the identity of a human subject and the motions performed by the subject. The dynamic shapes of four subjects in five activities (digging, jogging, limping, throwing, and walking) were created via 3-D motion replication. The Paquet Shape Descriptor (PSD) was used to describe subject shapes in each frame. The principal component analysis was performed on the calculated PSDs and principal components (PCs) were used to characterize PSDs. The PSD calculation was then reasonably approximated by its significant projections in the eigen-space formed by PCs and represented by the corresponding projection coefficients. As such, the dynamic human shapes for each activity were described by these projection coefficients, which in turn, along with their derivatives were used to form the feature vectors (attribute sets) for activity classification. Data mining technology was employed with six classification methods used. Seven attribute sets were evaluated with high classification accuracy attained for most of them. The results from this investigation illustrate the great potential of human shape dynamics for activity recognition.