MMNet: A Model-Based Multimodal Network for Human Action Recognition in RGB-D Videos

Human action recognition (HAR) in RGB-D videos has been widely investigated since the release of affordable depth sensors. Currently, unimodal approaches (e.g., skeleton-based and RGB video-based) have realized substantial improvements with increasingly larger datasets. However, multimodal methods specifically with model-level fusion have seldom been investigated. In this article, we propose a model-based multimodal network (MMNet) that fuses skeleton and RGB modalities via a model-based approach. The objective of our method is to improve ensemble recognition accuracy by effectively applying mutually complementary information from different data modalities. For the model-based fusion scheme, we use a spatiotemporal graph convolution network for the skeleton modality to learn attention weights that will be transferred to the network of the RGB modality. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, PKU-MMD, Northwestern-UCLA Multiview, and Toyota Smarthome. Upon aggregating the results of multiple modalities, our method is found to outperform state-of-the-art approaches on six evaluation protocols of the five datasets; thus, the proposed MMNet can effectively capture mutually complementary features in different RGB-D video modalities and provide more discriminative features for HAR. We also tested our MMNet on an RGB video dataset Kinetics 400 that contains more outdoor actions, which shows consistent results with those of RGB-D video datasets.

Automated summary

This article proposes a model-based multimodal network (MMNet) that fuses skeleton and RGB modalities in order to improve ensemble recognition accuracy by effectively applying mutually complementary information from different data modalities. Experimental results show that the proposed MMNet outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on five benchmark datasets, effectively capturing mutually complementary features in different RGB-D video modalities and providing more discriminative features for human action recognition.