Gaussian Topology Refinement and Multi-Scale Shift Graph Convolution for Efficient Real-Time Sports Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition is a critical technology for intelligent sports analysis. Although the human skeletal structure exhibits inherent bilateral symmetry, sensor noise on resource-constrained edge devices frequently induces geometric distortion and topological asymmetry. Consequently, achieving a balance between high accuracy and real-time performance remains a significant challenge. To this end, we propose EMS-GCN, an Efficient Multi-scale Shift Graph Convolutional Network that integrates geometric priors. Specifically, we design a Gaussian kernel-driven topology refinement module to mitigate structural noise inherent in sensor data. By leveraging geometric symmetry and Gaussian distances among nodes, this module dynamically constrains graph topology learning, thereby effectively rectifying the structural asymmetry and ambiguity induced by noise. Furthermore, we construct a Multi-scale Shift Linear Attention (MSLA) module to replace computationally intensive temporal convolutions. Leveraging temporal shift invariance, this module captures multi-scale contexts via parameter-free shift operations. Furthermore, we introduce a linear temporal attention mechanism to model global temporal dependencies with linear complexity, effectively resolving the information asymmetry inherent in long-range interactions. Finally, EMS-GCN incorporates a dual-branch attention structure to adaptively calibrate feature responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model maintains high recognition accuracy with only 0.56 M parameters, representing a reduction of over 60% compared to mainstream baselines. These results validate the efficacy of leveraging geometric and temporal symmetries to enhance real-time sports analysis.