Graph CNNs with motif and variable temporal block for skeleton-based action recognition

Hierarchical structure and different semantic roles of joints in human skeleton convey important information for action recognition. Conventional graph convolution methods for modeling skeleton structure consider only physically connected neighbors of each joint, and the joints of the same type, thus failing to capture high-order information. In this work, we propose a novel model with motif-based graph convolution to encode hierarchical spatial structure, and a variable temporal dense block to exploit local temporal information over different ranges of human skeleton sequences. Moreover, we employ a non-local block to capture global dependencies of temporal domain in an attention mechanism. Our model achieves improvements over the state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale datasets.