Discriminant Bag of Words based representation for human action recognition

• Human action recognition based on Bag of Words representation.
• Discriminant codebook learning for better action class discrimination.
• Unified framework for the determination of both the optimized codebook and linear data projections.

In this paper we propose a novel framework for human action recognition based on Bag of Words (BoWs) action representation, that unifies discriminative codebook generation and discriminant subspace learning. The proposed framework is able to, naturally, incorporate several (linear or non-linear) discrimination criteria for discriminant BoWs-based action representation. An iterative optimization scheme is proposed for sequential discriminant BoWs-based action representation and codebook adaptation based on action discrimination in a reduced dimensionality feature space where action classes are better discriminated. Experiments on five publicly available data sets aiming at different application scenarios demonstrate that the proposed unified approach increases the codebook discriminative ability providing enhanced action classification performance.