Learning Mutual Excitation for Hand-to-Hand and Human-to-Human Interaction Recognition
State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学通用人工智能省重点实验室）；OPPO AI Center（OPPO人工智能中心）；Sony R&D Center China（索尼中国研发中心）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Mengyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Songtao Wu, Fanyang Meng, Hong Liu
发表信息：
IEEE Transactions on Human Machine Systems (THMS), 2025
Recognizing interactive actions, including hand-to-hand interaction and human-to-human interaction, has attracted increasing attention for various applications in the field of video analysis and human-robot interaction. Considering the success of graph convolution in modeling topology-aware features from skeleton data, recent methods commonly operate graph convolution on separate entities and use late fusion for interactive action recognition, which can barely model the mutual semantic relationships between pairwise entities. To this end, we propose a mutual excitation graph convolutional network (me-GCN) by stacking mutual excitation graph convolution (me-GC) layers. Specifically, me-GC uses a mutual topology excitation module to firstly extract adjacency matrices from individual entities and then adaptively model the mutual constraints between them. Moreover, me-GC extends the above idea and further uses a mutual feature excitation module to extract and merge deep features from pairwise entities. Compared with graph convolution, our proposed me-GC gradually learns mutual information in each layer and each stage of graph convolution operations. Extensive experiments on a challenging hand-to-hand interaction dataset, i.e., the Assembely101 dataset, and two large-scale human-to-human interaction datasets, i.e., NTU60-Interaction and NTU120-Interaction consistently verify the superiority of our proposed method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art GCN-based and Transformer-based methods.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Skeleton data carries valuable motion information and is widely explored in human action recognition. However, not only the motion information but also the interaction with the environment provides discriminative cues to recognize the action of persons. In this paper, we propose a joint learning framework for mutually assisted "interacted object localization" and "human action recognition" based on skeleton data. The two tasks are serialized together and collaborate to promote each other, where preliminary action type derived from skeleton alone helps improve interacted object localization, wh…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Person-person mutual action recognition (also referred to as interaction recognition) is an important research branch of human activity analysis. Current solutions in the field -- mainly dominated by CNNs, GCNs and LSTMs -- often consist of complicated architectures and mechanisms to embed the relationships between the two persons on the architecture itself, to ensure the interaction patterns can be properly learned. Our main contribution with this work is by proposing a simpler yet very powerful architecture, named Interaction Relational Network, which utilizes minimal prior knowledge about t…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Caltech（加州理工学院）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）
We introduce a novel representation learning method to disentangle pose-dependent as well as view-dependent factors from 2D human poses. The method trains a network using cross-view mutual information maximization (CV-MIM) which maximizes mutual information of the same pose performed from different viewpoints in a contrastive learning manner. We further propose two regularization terms to ensure disentanglement and smoothness of the learned representations. The resulting pose representations can be used for cross-view action recognition. To evaluate the power of the learned representations, in…
Zero-shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Mutual Information Estimation and Maximization
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Action Recognition with Multi-stream Motion Modeling and Mutual Information Maximization
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学网络空间安全学院）；Public Computer Education and Research Center, Jilin University（吉林大学公共计算机教育与研究中心）；Black Sesame Technologies（黑芝麻科技）
Korea University（高丽大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Korea Electric Technology Institute（韩国电气技术研究院）；DigiCAP Inc.（DigiCAP公司）
We introduce a multi-stage framework that uses mean curvature on a hand surface and focuses on learning interaction between hand and object by analyzing hand grasp type for hand action recognition in egocentric videos. The proposed method does not require 3D information of objects including 6D object poses which are difficult to annotate for learning an object's behavior while it interacts with hands. Instead, the framework synthesizes the mean curvature of the hand mesh model to encode the hand surface geometry in 3D space. Additionally, our method learns the hand grasp type which is highly c…
University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Computer Vision Centre（计算机视觉中心）
Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing human daily activities from data collected by wearable cameras. Since the hands are involved in a vast set of daily tasks, detecting hands in egocentric images is an important step towards the recognition of a variety of egocentric actions. However, besides extreme illumination changes in egocentric images, hand detection is not a trivial task because of the intrinsic large variability of hand appearance. We propose a hand detector that exploits skin modeling for fast hand proposal generation and Convolutional Neural Networks for hand re…
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（蔚山科学技术院（UNIST））
This report describes the 2nd place solution to the ECCV 2022 Human Body, Hands, and Activities (HBHA) from Egocentric and Multi-view Cameras Challenge: Action Recognition. This challenge aims to recognize hand-object interaction in an egocentric view. We propose a framework that estimates keypoints of two hands and an object with a Transformer-based keypoint estimator and recognizes actions based on the estimated keypoints. We achieved a top-1 accuracy of 87.19% on the testset.
Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Bitbrain Technologies（比特脑科技）
Hand action recognition is a special case of action recognition with applications in human-robot interaction, virtual reality or life-logging systems. Building action classifiers able to work for such heterogeneous action domains is very challenging. There are very subtle changes across different actions from a given application but also large variations across domains (e.g. virtual reality vs life-logging). This work introduces a novel skeleton-based hand motion representation model that tackles this problem. The framework we propose is agnostic to the application domain or camera recording v…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心）
Independent Sign Language Recognition is a complex visual recognition problem that combines several challenging tasks of Computer Vision due to the necessity to exploit and fuse information from hand gestures, body features and facial expressions. While many state-of-the-art works have managed to deeply elaborate on these features independently, to the best of our knowledge, no work has adequately combined all three information channels to efficiently recognize Sign Language. In this work, we employ SMPL-X, a contemporary parametric model that enables joint extraction of 3D body shape, face an…
Existing action recognition methods mainly focus on joint and bone information in human body skeleton data due to its robustness to complex backgrounds and dynamic characteristics of the environments. In this paper, we combine body skeleton data with spatial and motion features from face and two hands, and present "Deep Action Stamps (DeepActs)", a novel data representation to encode actions from video sequences. We also present "DeepActsNet", a deep learning based ensemble model which learns convolutional and structural features from Deep Action Stamps for highly accurate action recognition. …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；ByteDance（字节跳动）
In this work, we aim to address the challenging task of open set recognition (OSR). Many recent OSR methods rely on auto-encoders to extract class-specific features by a reconstruction strategy, requiring the network to restore the input image on pixel-level. This strategy is commonly over-demanding for OSR since class-specific features are generally contained in target objects, not in all pixels. To address this shortcoming, here we discard the pixel-level reconstruction strategy and pay more attention to improving the effectiveness of class-specific feature extraction. We propose a mutual in…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
Handwritten mathematical expression recognition aims to automatically generate LaTeX sequences from given images. Currently, attention-based encoder-decoder models are widely used in this task. They typically generate target sequences in a left-to-right (L2R) manner, leaving the right-to-left (R2L) contexts unexploited. In this paper, we propose an Attention aggregation based Bi-directional Mutual learning Network (ABM) which consists of one shared encoder and two parallel inverse decoders (L2R and R2L). The two decoders are enhanced via mutual distillation, which involves one-to-one knowledge…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本国立先进工业科学技术研究所 (AIST)）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）
This paper addresses the problem of object recognition given a set of images as input (e.g., multiple camera sources and video frames). Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based frameworks do not exploit these sets effectively, processing a pattern as observed, not capturing the underlying feature distribution as it does not consider the variance of images in the set. To address this issue, we propose the Grassmannian learning mutual subspace method (G-LMSM), a NN layer embedded on top of CNNs as a classifier, that can process image sets more effectively and can be trained in an end-to-end mann…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
Knowledge distillation is an effective method to improve the performance of a lightweight neural network (i.e., student model) by transferring the knowledge of a well-performed neural network (i.e., teacher model), which has been widely applied in many computer vision tasks, including face recognition. Nevertheless, the current face recognition distillation methods usually utilize the Feature Consistency Distillation (FCD) (e.g., L2 distance) on the learned embeddings extracted by the teacher and student models for each sample, which is not able to fully transfer the knowledge from the teacher…
Ego hand gestures can be used as an interface in AR and VR environments. While the context of an image is important for tasks like scene understanding, object recognition, image caption generation and activity recognition, it plays a minimal role in ego hand gesture recognition. An ego hand gesture used for AR and VR environments conveys the same information regardless of the background. With this idea in mind, we present our work on ego hand gesture recognition that produces embeddings from RBG images with ego hands, which are simultaneously used for ego hand segmentation and ego gesture reco…
Mutual Modality Trust with Lightweight Reconstruction Regularization for Fine-grained Tire Pattern Recognition
School of Communications and Information Engineering, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications（西安邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Hainan Normal University（海南师范大学人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能与光电学院）
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
The teacher-free online Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to train an ensemble of multiple student models collaboratively and distill knowledge from each other. Although existing online KD methods achieve desirable performance, they often focus on class probabilities as the core knowledge type, ignoring the valuable feature representational information. We present a Mutual Contrastive Learning (MCL) framework for online KD. The core idea of MCL is to perform mutual interaction and transfer of contrastive distributions among a cohort of networks in an online manner. Our MCL can aggregate cross-n…
One Model for Two Tasks: Cooperatively Recognizing and Recovering Low-Resolution Scene Text Images by Iterative Mutual Guidance
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing（上海智能信息处理重点实验室）；Tongji University（同济大学）
University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In this paper, we propose a method for image-set classification based on convex cone models. Image set classification aims to classify a set of images, which were usually obtained from video frames or multi-view cameras, into a target object. To accurately and stably classify a set, it is essential to represent structural information of the set accurately. There are various representative image features, such as histogram based features, HLAC, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. We should note that most of them have non-negativity and thus can be effectively represented by a conve…
School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）
The "curse of dimensionality" is a well-known problem in pattern recognition. A widely used approach to tackling the problem is a group of subspace methods, where the original features are projected onto a new space. The lower dimensional subspace is then used to approximate the original features for classification. However, most subspace methods were not originally developed for classification. We believe that direct adoption of these subspace methods for pattern classification should not be considered best practice. In this paper, we present a new information theory based algorithm for selec…
Interpretation of different writing styles, unconstrained cursiveness and relationship between different primitive parts is an essential and challenging task for recognition of handwritten characters. As feature representation is inadequate, appropriate interpretation/description of handwritten characters seems to be a challenging task. Although existing research in handwritten characters is extensive, it still remains a challenge to get the effective representation of characters in feature space. In this paper, we make an attempt to circumvent these problems by proposing an approach that expl…
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Automatic Cued Speech Recognition (ACSR) provides an intelligent human-machine interface for visual communications, where the Cued Speech (CS) system utilizes lip movements and hand gestures to code spoken language for hearing-impaired people. Previous ACSR approaches often utilize direct feature concatenation as the main fusion paradigm. However, the asynchronous modalities i.e., lip, hand shape and hand position) in CS may cause interference for feature concatenation. To address this challenge, we propose a transformer based cross-modal mutual learning framework to prompt multi-modal interac…
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；AWS AI Labs（亚马逊云科技人工智能实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Open-set recognition and adversarial defense study two key aspects of deep learning that are vital for real-world deployment. The objective of open-set recognition is to identify samples from open-set classes during testing, while adversarial defense aims to robustify the network against images perturbed by imperceptible adversarial noise. This paper demonstrates that open-set recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial samples. Furthermore, this paper shows that adversarial defense mechanisms trained on known classes are unable to generalize well to open-set samples. Motivated by these …
Gesture recognition is a very essential technology for many wearable devices. While previous algorithms are mostly based on statistical methods including the hidden Markov model, we develop two dynamic hand gesture recognition techniques using low complexity recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithms. One is based on video signal and employs a combined structure of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and an RNN. The other uses accelerometer data and only requires an RNN. Fixed-point optimization that quantizes most of the weights into two bits is conducted to optimize the amount of memory size…
3D hand-object pose estimation is the key to the success of many computer vision applications. The main focus of this task is to effectively model the interaction between the hand and an object. To this end, existing works either rely on interaction constraints in a computationally-expensive iterative optimization, or consider only a sparse correlation between sampled hand and object keypoints. In contrast, we propose a novel dense mutual attention mechanism that is able to model fine-grained dependencies between the hand and the object. Specifically, we first construct the hand and object gra…
Demand of hand pose recognition systems are growing in the last years in technologies like human-machine interfaces. This work suggests an approach for hand pose recognition in embedded computers using hand tracking and CNNs. Results show a fast time response with an accuracy of 94.50% and low power consumption.
Recognition of hand gestures is one of the most fundamental tasks in human-robot interaction. Sparse representation based methods have been widely used due to their efficiency and low demands on the training data. Recently, nonconvex regularization techniques including the $\ell_{1-2}$ regularization have been proposed in the image processing community to promote sparsity while achieving efficient performance. In this paper, we propose a vision-based hand gesture recognition model based on the $\ell_{1-2}$ regularization, which is solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM…
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（多媒体软件国家工程研究中心）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Multimedia Network Communication Engineering（多媒体网络通信工程湖北省重点实验室）
Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution (ST-VSR) aims to generate super-resolved videos with higher resolution(HR) and higher frame rate (HFR). Quite intuitively, pioneering two-stage based methods complete ST-VSR by directly combining two sub-tasks: Spatial Video Super-Resolution (S-VSR) and Temporal Video Super-Resolution(T-VSR) but ignore the reciprocal relations among them. Specifically, 1) T-VSR to S-VSR: temporal correlations help accurate spatial detail representation with more clues; 2) S-VSR to T-VSR: abundant spatial information contributes to the refinement of temporal prediction. T…
Hand gesture recognition has long been a hot topic in human computer interaction. Traditional camera-based hand gesture recognition systems cannot work properly under dark circumstances. In this paper, a Doppler Radar based hand gesture recognition system using convolutional neural networks is proposed. A cost-effective Doppler radar sensor with dual receiving channels at 5.8GHz is used to acquire a big database of four standard gestures. The received hand gesture signals are then processed with time-frequency analysis. Convolutional neural networks are used to classify different gestures. Exp…
Offline handwriting recognition systems require cropped text line images for both training and recognition. On the one hand, the annotation of position and transcript at line level is costly to obtain. On the other hand, automatic line segmentation algorithms are prone to errors, compromising the subsequent recognition. In this paper, we propose a modification of the popular and efficient multi-dimensional long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (MDLSTM-RNNs) to enable end-to-end processing of handwritten paragraphs. More particularly, we replace the collapse layer transforming the tw…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Lingxi Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd（灵汐人工智能有限公司）
Gesture recognition is a hot topic in computer vision and pattern recognition, which plays a vitally important role in natural human-computer interface. Although great progress has been made recently, fast and robust hand gesture recognition remains an open problem, since the existing methods have not well balanced the performance and the efficiency simultaneously. To bridge it, this work combines image entropy and density clustering to exploit the key frames from hand gesture video for further feature extraction, which can improve the efficiency of recognition. Moreover, a feature fusion stra…
Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University（沙希德·拉贾伊师范大学）；University of Mohaghegh Ardabili（莫哈格赫·阿尔达比勒大学）；Blaise Pascal University（布莱斯·帕斯卡大学）
At the present time, hand gestures recognition system could be used as a more expected and useable approach for human computer interaction. Automatic hand gesture recognition system provides us a new tactic for interactive with the virtual environment. In this paper, a face and hand gesture recognition system which is able to control computer media player is offered. Hand gesture and human face are the key element to interact with the smart system. We used the face recognition scheme for viewer verification and the hand gesture recognition in mechanism of computer media player, for instance, v…
The human hand possesses distinctive features which can reveal gender information. In addition, the hand is considered one of the primary biometric traits used to identify a person. In this work, we propose a large dataset of human hand images (dorsal and palmar sides) with detailed ground-truth information for gender recognition and biometric identification. Using this dataset, a convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained effectively for the gender recognition task. Based on this, we design a two-stream CNN to tackle the gender recognition problem. This trained model is then used as a …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Learning from synthetic images plays an important role in facial expression recognition task due to the difficulties of labeling the real images, and it is challenging because of the gap between the synthetic images and real images. The fourth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild Competition raises the challenge and provides the synthetic images generated from Aff-Wild2 dataset. In this paper, we propose a hand-assisted expression recognition method to reduce the gap between the synthetic data and real data. Our method consists of two parts: expression recognition module and hand prediction…
American Sign Language recognition is a difficult gesture recognition problem, characterized by fast, highly articulate gestures. These are comprised of arm movements with different hand shapes, facial expression and head movements. Among these components, hand shape is the vital, often the most discriminative part of a gesture. In this work, we present an approach for effective learning of hand shape embeddings, which are discriminative for ASL gestures. For hand shape recognition our method uses a mix of manually labelled hand shapes and high confidence predictions to train deep convolutiona…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）
In this study, we introduce a novel variant and application of the Collaborative Representation based Classification in spectral domain for recognition of the hand gestures using the raw surface Electromyography signals. The intuitive use of spectral features are explained via circulant matrices. The proposed Spectral Collaborative Representation based Classification (SCRC) is able to recognize gestures with higher levels of accuracy for a fairly rich gesture set. The worst recognition result which is the best in the literature is obtained as 97.3\% among the four sets of the experiments for e…
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Over the years, hand gesture recognition has been mostly addressed considering hand trajectories in isolation. However, in most sign languages, hand gestures are defined on a particular context (body region). We propose a pipeline to perform sign language recognition which models hand movements in the context of other parts of the body captured in the 3D space using the MS Kinect sensor. In addition, we perform sign recognition based on the different hand postures that occur during a sign. Our experiments show that considering different body parts brings improved performance when compared to o…
This paper contributes a new high-quality dataset for hand gesture recognition in hand hygiene systems, named "MFH". Generally, current datasets are not focused on: (i) fine-grained actions; and (ii) data mismatch between different viewpoints, which are available under realistic settings. To address the aforementioned issues, the MFH dataset is proposed to contain a total of 731147 samples obtained by different camera views in 6 non-overlapping locations. Additionally, each sample belongs to one of seven steps introduced by the World Health Organization (WHO). As a minor contribution, inspired…
Dynamic hand gesture recognition has attracted increasing interests because of its importance for human computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a new motion feature augmented recurrent neural network for skeleton-based dynamic hand gesture recognition. Finger motion features are extracted to describe finger movements and global motion features are utilized to represent the global movement of hand skeleton. These motion features are then fed into a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) along with the skeleton sequence, which can augment the motion features for RNN and improve the…
Human eye can see and read what is written or displayed either in natural handwriting or in printed format. The same work in case the machine does is called handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition can be broken down into two categories: off-line and on-line. ...
Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is of major importance for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications. In this paper, we present a new hand gesture recognition approach called GNG-IEMD. In this approach, first, we use a Growing Neural Gas (GNG) graph to model the image. Then we extract features from this graph. These features are not geometric or pixel-based, so do not depend on scale, rotation, and articulation. The dissimilarity between hand gestures is measured with a novel Improved Earth Mover\textquotesingle s Distance (IEMD) metric. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach …
The ultimate aim of handwriting recognition is to make computers able to read and/or authenticate human written texts, with a performance comparable to or even better than that of humans. Reading means that the computer is given a piece of handwriting and it provides the electronic transcription of that (e.g. in ASCII format). Two types of handwriting: on-line and offline. The most important purpose of off-line handwriting recognition is in protection systems and authentication. Arabic Handwriting scripts are much more complicated in comparison to Latin scripts. This paper introduces a simple …
We present an on-device real-time hand gesture recognition (HGR) system, which detects a set of predefined static gestures from a single RGB camera. The system consists of two parts: a hand skeleton tracker and a gesture classifier. We use MediaPipe Hands as the basis of the hand skeleton tracker, improve the keypoint accuracy, and add the estimation of 3D keypoints in a world metric space. We create two different gesture classifiers, one based on heuristics and the other using neural networks (NN).
TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；University of Tuebingen（图宾根大学）；Intel Labs Europe（英特尔欧洲实验室）；Intel Deutschland GmbH（英特尔德国有限公司）
The use of hand gestures provides a natural alternative to cumbersome interface devices for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems. However, real-time recognition of dynamic micro hand gestures from video streams is challenging for in-vehicle scenarios since (i) the gestures should be performed naturally without distracting the driver, (ii) micro hand gestures occur within very short time intervals at spatially constrained areas, (iii) the performed gesture should be recognized only once, and (iv) the entire architecture should be designed lightweight as it will be deployed to an embedded sy…
