Body pose analysis is an important factor of human action recognition. Recently, the proposed Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and deep ConvNets-based methods are showing good performances in learning sequential information. Despite these good performances, RNN lacks to efficiently learn spatial relation between body parts while deep ConvNets require a huge amount of data for training. We propose a Distance-based Neural Network (DNN) for action recognition in static images. We compute effective distances between a set of body part pairs for a given image and feed to DNN to learn effective representation of complex actions. We also propose Distance-based Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to learn representations from 2D images. The distances are rearranged in 2D grayscale image called as a Distance Image. This 2D representation allows the network to learn specific discriminative information between adjacent pixel distance values corresponding to different body part pairs. We evaluate our method on two real-world datasets i.e. UT-Interaction and SBU Kinect Interaction. Results show that our proposed method achieves better performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract Most interaction recognition approaches have been limited to single‐person action classification in videos. However, for still images where motion information is not available, the task becomes more complex. Aiming to this point, we propose an approach for multiperson human interaction recognition in images with keypoint‐based feature image analysis. Proposed method is a three‐stage framework. In the first stage, we propose feature‐based neural network (FCNN) for action recognition trained with feature images. Feature images are body features, that is, effective distances between a set of body part pairs and angular relation between body part triplets, rearranged in 2D gray‐scale image to learn effective representation of complex actions. In the later stage, we propose a voting‐based method for direction encoding to anticipate probable motion in steady images. Finally, our multiperson interaction recognition algorithm identifies which human pairs are interacting with each other using an interaction parameter. We evaluate our approach on two real‐world data sets, that is, UT‐interaction and SBU kinect interaction. The empirical experiments show that results are better than the state‐of‐the‐art methods with recognition accuracy of 95.83% on UT‐I set 1, 92.5% on UT‐I set 2, and 94.28% on SBU clean data set.

Kinship recognition is a prominent research aiming to find if kinship relation exists between two different individuals. In general, child closely resembles his/her parents more than others based on facial similarities. These similarities are due to genetically inherited facial features that a child shares with his/her parents. Most existing researches in kinship recognition focus on full facial images to find these kinship similarities. This paper first presents kinship recognition for similar full facial images using proposed Global-based dual-tree complex wavelet transform (G-DTCWT). We then present novel patch-based kinship recognition methods based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT): Local Patch-based DT-CWT (LP-DTCWT) and Selective Patch-Based DT-CWT (SP-DTCWT). LP-DTCWT extracts coefficients for smaller facial patches for kinship recognition. SP-DTCWT is an extension to LP-DTCWT and extracts coefficients only for representative patches with similarity scores above a normalized cumulative threshold. This threshold is computed by a novel patch selection process. These representative patches contribute more similarities in parent/child image pairs and improve kinship accuracy. Proposed methods are extensively evaluated on different publicly available kinship datasets to validate kinship accuracy. Experimental results showcase efficacy of proposed methods on all kinship datasets. SP-DTCWT achieves competitive accuracy to state-of-the-art methods. Mean kinship accuracy of SP-DTCWT is 95.85% on baseline KinFaceW-I and 95.30% on KinFaceW-II datasets. Further, SP-DTCWT achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 80.49% on the largest kinship dataset, Families In the Wild (FIW).