A Three Tiered Approach for Articulated Object Action Modeling and Recognition

Visual action recognition is an important problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a new method to probabilistically model and recognize actions of articulated objects, such as hand or body gestures, in image sequences. Our method consists of three levels of representa- tion. At the low level, we first extract a feature vector invariant to scale and in-plane rotation by using the Fourier transform of a circular spatial histogram. Then, spectral partitioning [20] is utilized to obtain an initial clustering; this clustering is then refined using a temporal smoothness constraint.