Recognition and Prediction of Human-Object Interactions with a Self-Organizing Architecture

Abstract

The recognition and prediction of human actions are challenging perception tasks that require reasoning upon a large space of fine-grained body motion patterns. In this work, we propose a hierarchical self-organizing architecture which jointly learns to recognize and predict human-object interactions from RGB-D videos. Our model consists of a hierarchy of Grow-When-Required (GWR) networks which process and learn co-occurring actions and objects from the training data. Our goal is to learn prototype body motion patterns when manipulating objects as well as to internally store prototype transitions of body postures over time. The architecture can generate sequences of arbitrary length given an observed initial motion pattern as well as predict future action labels. Experimental results on a dataset of daily activities demonstrate that our architecture recognizes ongoing actions and predicts the upcoming ones with high accuracy. The generated body pose trajectories demonstrate that our architecture is suitable to be further applied to the problem of the look-ahead planning of a robotic response in a human-robot interaction scenario.