Learning discriminative motion feature for enhancing multi-modal action recognition

Video action recognition is an important topic in computer vision tasks. Most of the existing methods use CNN-based models, and multiple modalities of image features are captured from the videos, such as static frames, dynamic images, and optical flow features. However, these mainstream features contain much static information including object and background information, where the motion information of the action itself is not distinguished and strengthened. In this work, a new kind of motion feature is proposed without static information for video action recognition. We propose a quantization of motion network based on the bag-of-feature method to learn significant and discriminative motion features. In the learned feature map, the object and background information is filtered out, even if the background is moving in the video. Therefore, the motion feature is complementary to the static image feature and the static information in the dynamic image and optical flow. A multi-stream classifier is built with the proposed motion feature and other features, and the performance of action recognition is enhanced comparing to other state-of-the-art methods. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.