Temporal segmentation of human actions in video sequences

Most of the published works concerning action recognition, usually assume that the action sequences have been previously segmented in time, that is, the action to be recognized starts with the first sequence frame and ends with the last one. However, temporal segmentation of actions in sequences is not an easy task, and is always prone to errors. In this paper, we present a new technique to automatically extract human actions from a video sequence. Our approach presents several contributions. First of all, we use a projection template scheme and find spatio-temporal features and descriptors within the projected surface, rather than extracting them in the whole sequence. For projecting the sequence we use a variant of the R transform, which has never been used before for temporal action segmentation. Instead of projecting the original video sequence, we project its optical flow components, preserving important information about action motion. We test our method on a publicly available action dataset, and the results show that it performs very well segmenting human actions compared with the state-of-the-art methods.