Independent shape component-based human activity recognition via Hidden Markov Model

In proactive computing, human activity recognition from image sequences is an active research area. In this paper, a novel human activity recognition method is proposed, which utilizes Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for activity shape information extraction from image sequences and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for recognition. Various human activities are represented by shape feature vectors from the sequence of activity shape images via ICA. Based on these features, each HMM is trained and activity recognition is achieved by the trained HMMs of different activities. Our recognition performance has been compared to the conventional method where Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is typically used to derive activity shape features. Our results show that superior recognition is achieved with the proposed method especially for activities (e.g., skipping) that cannot be easily recognized by the conventional method. Furthermore, by employing Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) on IC features, the recognition results further improved significantly in the recognition performance.