Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition with Spatial and Temporal Attention-Enhanced Graph Convolution Networks

Skeleton-based human action recognition has great potential for human behavior analysis owing to its simplicity and robustness in varying environments. This paper presents a spatial and temporal attention-enhanced graph convolution network (STAEGCN) for human action recognition. The spatial-temporal attention module in the network uses convolution embedding for positional information and adopts multi-head self-attention mechanism to extract spatial and temporal attention separately from the input series of the skeleton. The spatial and temporal attention are then concatenated into an entire attention map according to a specific ratio. The proposed spatial and temporal attention module was integrated with an adaptive graph convolution network to form the backbone of STAEGCN. Based on STAEGCN, a two-stream skeleton-based human action recognition model was trained and evaluated. The model performed better on both NTU RGB+D and Kinetics 400 than 2s-AGCN and its variants. It was proven that the strategy of decoupling spatial and temporal attention and combining them in a flexible way helps improve the performance of graph convolution networks in skeleton-based human action recognition.