Activity-based human identification

We investigate in this paper the problem of activity-based human identification. Different from most existing gait recognition methods where only human walking activity is considered and utilized for person identification, we aim to identify people from various activities such as eating, jumping, and weaving. For each video clip, we first extract binary human body masks by using background substraction, followed by computing the average energy image (AEI) features to represent each video clip. Then, a mapping is learned by applying an adaptive discriminant analysis (ADA) method to project AEI features into a low-dimensional subspace, such that the intra-class (activities performed by the same person) variations are minimized and the interclass (activities performed by different persons) are maximized, simultaneously. Moreover, interclass samples with large similarity difference are deemphasized and those with small difference are emphasized, such that more discriminative information can be used for recognition. Experimental results on three publicly available databases show the efficacy of our proposed approach.