Sparse coding for learning interpretable spatio-temporal primitives

Sparse coding has recently become a popular approach in computer vision to learn dictionaries of natural images. In this paper we extend the sparse coding framework to learn interpretable spatio-temporal primitives. We formulated the problem as a tensor factorization problem with tensor group norm constraints over the primitives, diagonal constraints on the activations that provide interpretability as well as smoothness constraints that are inherent to human motion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to learn interpretable representations of human motion from motion capture data, and show that our approach outperforms recently developed matching pursuit and sparse coding algorithms