Three-dimensional human activity recognition by forming a movement polygon using posture skeletal data from depth sensor

Human activity recognition in real time is a challenging task. Recently, a plethora of studies has been proposed using deep learning architectures. The implementation of these architectures requires the high computing power of the machine and a massive database. However, handcrafted features-based machine learning models need less computing power and very accurate where features are effectively extracted. In this study, we propose a handcrafted model based on three-dimensional sequential skeleton data. The human body skeleton movement over a frame is computed through joint positions in a frame. The joints of these skeletal frames are projected into two-dimensional space, forming a “movement polygon.” These polygons are further transformed into a one-dimensional space by computing amplitudes at different angles from the centroid of polygons. The feature vector is formed by the sampling of these amplitudes at different angles. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using a support vector machine on four public datasets: MSR Action3D, Berkeley MHAD, TST Fall Detection, and NTU-RGB+D, and the highest accuracies achieved on these datasets are 94.13%, 93.34%, 95.7%, and 86.8%, respectively. These accuracies are compared with similar state-of-the-art and show superior performance