Recognizing human actions in still images: a study of bag-of-features and part-based representations

Recognition of human actions is usually addressed in the scope of video interpretation. Meanwhile, common human actions such as "reading a book", "playing a guitar" or "writing notes" also provide a natural description for many still images. In addition, some actions in video such as "taking a photograph" are static by their nature and may require recognition methods based on static cues only. Motivated by the potential impact of recognizing actions in still images and the little attention this problem has received in computer vision so far, we address recognition of human actions in consumer photographs. We construct a new dataset with seven classes of actions in 968 Flickr images representing natural variations of human actions in terms of camera view-point, human pose, clothing, occlusions and scene background. We study action recognition in still images using the state-of-the-art bag-of-features methods as well as their combination with the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMVC
• Authors: Vincent Delaitre, Ivan Laptev, Josef Sivic
• Keywords: Background Scene Context, BMVC 2010, Common Human Actions, Computer Vision, Human Actions