Human action recognition using attention based LSTM network with dilated CNN features

Abstract Human action recognition in videos is an active area of research in computer vision and pattern recognition. Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) based systems are needed for human-behavior assessment and security purposes. The existing action recognition techniques are mainly using pre-trained weights of different AI architectures for the visual representation of video frames in the training stage, which affect the features’ discrepancy determination, such as the distinction between the visual and temporal signs. To address this issue, we propose a bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) based attention mechanism with a dilated convolutional neural network (DCNN) that selectively focuses on effective features in the input frame to recognize the different human actions in the videos. In this diverse network, we use the DCNN layers to extract the salient discriminative features by using the residual blocks to upgrade the features that keep more information than a shallow layer. Furthermore, we feed these features into a BiLSTM to learn the long-term dependencies, which is followed by the attention mechanism to boost the performance and extract the additional high-level selective action related patterns and cues. We further use the center loss with Softmax to improve the loss function that achieves a higher performance in the video-based action classification. The proposed system is evaluated on three benchmarks, i.e., UCF11, UCF sports, and J-HMDB datasets for which it achieved a recognition rate of 98.3%, 99.1%, and 80.2%, respectively, showing 1%–3% improvement compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.