Symbiotic Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition and Motion Prediction
This work improves human activity understanding for applications like robotics and surveillance by integrating two related tasks, though it is incremental in combining existing graph neural network approaches.
The paper tackles the separate handling of 3D skeleton-based human action recognition and motion prediction by proposing a symbiotic model that jointly addresses both tasks, achieving better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on datasets like NTU-RGB+D and Human3.6M.
3D skeleton-based action recognition and motion prediction are two essential problems of human activity understanding. In many previous works: 1) they studied two tasks separately, neglecting internal correlations; 2) they did not capture sufficient relations inside the body. To address these issues, we propose a symbiotic model to handle two tasks jointly; and we propose two scales of graphs to explicitly capture relations among body-joints and body-parts. Together, we propose symbiotic graph neural networks, which contain a backbone, an action-recognition head, and a motion-prediction head. Two heads are trained jointly and enhance each other. For the backbone, we propose multi-branch multi-scale graph convolution networks to extract spatial and temporal features. The multi-scale graph convolution networks are based on joint-scale and part-scale graphs. The joint-scale graphs contain actional graphs, capturing action-based relations, and structural graphs, capturing physical constraints. The part-scale graphs integrate body-joints to form specific parts, representing high-level relations. Moreover, dual bone-based graphs and networks are proposed to learn complementary features. We conduct extensive experiments for skeleton-based action recognition and motion prediction with four datasets, NTU-RGB+D, Kinetics, Human3.6M, and CMU Mocap. Experiments show that our symbiotic graph neural networks achieve better performances on both tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.