Deep spatiotemporal LSTM network with temporal pattern feature for 3D human action recognition

With the rapid development of RGB‐D cameras and pose estimation techniques, action recognition based on three‐dimensional skeleton data has gained significant attention in the artificial intelligence community. In this paper, we incorporate temporal pattern descriptors of joint positions with the currently popular long short‐term memory (LSTM)–based learning scheme to obtain accurate and robust action recognition. Considering that actions are essentially formed by small subactions, we first utilize a two‐dimensional wavelet transform to extract temporal pattern descriptors in the frequency domain for each subaction. Afterward, we design a novel LSTM structure to extract deep features, which model a long‐term spatiotemporal correlation between body parts. Since temporal pattern descriptors and LSTM deep features can be regarded as multimodal representations for actions, we fuse them with an autoencoder network to achieve a more effective feature descriptor for action recognition. Experimental results on three challenging data sets with several comparative methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for three‐dimensional action recognition.