Papers › Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition

28 Apr 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2104.13586archive 2025-07-28

Haodong Duan, Yue Zhao, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai

Human skeleton, as a compact representation of human action, has received increasing attention in recent years. Many skeleton-based action recognition methods adopt graph convolutional networks (GCN) to extract features on top of human skeletons. Despite the positive results shown in previous works, GCN-based methods are subject to limitations in robustness, interoperability, and scalability. In this work, we propose PoseC3D, a new approach to skeleton-based action recognition, which relies on a 3D heatmap stack instead of a graph sequence as the base representation of human skeletons. Compared to GCN-based methods, PoseC3D is more effective in learning spatiotemporal features, more robust against pose estimation noises, and generalizes better in cross-dataset settings. Also, PoseC3D can handle multiple-person scenarios without additional computation cost, and its features can be easily integrated with other modalities at early fusion stages, which provides a great design space to further boost the performance. On four challenging datasets, PoseC3D consistently obtains superior performance, when used alone on skeletons and in combination with the RGB modality.

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Code

kennymckormick/pyskl mentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
open-mmlab/mmaction2 mentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

3D Action RecognitionAction RecognitionGroup Activity RecognitionPose EstimationSkeleton Based Action Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Action Recognition Assembly101 RGBPoseConv3D Actions Top-1 33.61 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
3D Action Recognition Assembly101 RGBPoseConv3D Object Top-1 42.90 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
3D Action Recognition Assembly101 RGBPoseConv3D Verbs Top-1 61.99 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition H2O (2 Hands and Objects) RGBPoseConv3D Actions Top-1 83.47 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition H2O (2 Hands and Objects) RGBPoseConv3D Hand Pose 2D #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition H2O (2 Hands and Objects) RGBPoseConv3D Object Label No #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition H2O (2 Hands and Objects) RGBPoseConv3D Object Pose No #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition H2O (2 Hands and Objects) RGBPoseConv3D RGB Yes #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (CS) 97.0 #2 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (CV) 99.6 #2 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (Cross-Setup) 96.4 #2 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (RGB + Pose) Accuracy (Cross-Subject) 95.3 #2 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Action Recognition Volleyball PoseC3D (Pose Only) Accuracy 91.3 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Group Activity Recognition Volleyball PoseC3D (Pose-Only) Accuracy 91.3 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition Kinetics-Skeleton dataset PoseC3D (SlowOnly-346) Accuracy 49.1 #4 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition Kinetics-Skeleton dataset PoseC3D Accuracy 47.7 #5 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D [3D Heatmap] Accuracy (CS) 94.1 #2 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D [3D Heatmap] Accuracy (CV) 97.1 #2 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D PoseC3D [3D Heatmap] Ensembled Modalities 2 #2 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (w. HRNet 2D Skeleton) Accuracy (Cross-Setup) 90.3 #37 of 83 Archive leaderboard report
Skeleton Based Action Recognition NTU RGB+D 120 PoseC3D (w. HRNet 2D Skeleton) Accuracy (Cross-Subject) 86.9 #37 of 83 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Graph Convolutional NetworksHeatmap

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