GCN-DevLSTM: Path Development for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition (SAR) in videos is an important but challenging task in computer vision. The recent state-of-the-art models for SAR are primarily based on graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs), which are powerful in extracting the spatial information of skeleton data. However, it is yet clear that such GCN-based models can effectively capture the temporal dynamics of human action sequences. To this end, we propose the DevLSTM module, which exploits the path development – a principled and parsimonious representation for sequential data by leveraging the Lie group structure. The path development, originated from Rough path theory, can effectively capture the order of events in high-dimensional stream data with massive dimension reduction and consequently enhance the LSTM module substantially. Our proposed G-DevLSTM module can be conveniently plugged into the temporal graph, complementing existing advanced GCN-based models. Our empirical studies on the NTU60, NTU120 and Chalearn2013 datasets demonstrate that our proposed hybrid model significantly outperforms the current best-performing methods in SAR tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepIntoStreams/GCN-DevLSTM.