Action recognition via spatio-temporal local features: A comprehensive study *

• A timely review of action recognition based on spatio-temporal local features.
• Transfer techniques in image domain to video domain for action recognition.
• Evaluation of representation methods for action recognition.

Local methods based on spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) have shown their effectiveness for human action recognition. The bag-of-words (BoW) model has been widely used and dominated in this field. Recently, a large number of techniques based on local features including improved variants of the BoW model, sparse coding (SC), Fisher kernels (FK), vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) as well as the naive Bayes nearest neighbor (NBNN) classifier have been proposed and developed for visual recognition. However, some of them are proposed in the image domain and have not yet been applied to the video domain and it is still unclear how effectively these techniques would perform on action recognition. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study on these local methods for human action recognition. We implement these techniques and conduct comparison under unified experimental settings on three widely used benchmarks, i.e., the KTH, UCF-YouTube and HMDB51 datasets. We discuss insightfully the findings from the experimental results and draw useful conclusions, which are expected to guide practical applications and future work for the action recognition community.