  Human activity understanding with 3D/depth sensors has received increasing
attention in multimedia processing and interactions. This work targets on
developing a novel deep model for automatic activity recognition from RGB-D
videos. We represent each human activity as an ensemble of cubic-like video
segments, and learn to discover the temporal structures for a category of
activities, i.e. how the activities to be decomposed in terms of
classification. Our model can be regarded as a structured deep architecture, as
it extends the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by incorporating structure
alternatives. Specifically, we build the network consisting of 3D convolutions
and max-pooling operators over the video segments, and introduce the latent
variables in each convolutional layer manipulating the activation of neurons.
Our model thus advances existing approaches in two aspects: (i) it acts
directly on the raw inputs (grayscale-depth data) to conduct recognition
instead of relying on hand-crafted features, and (ii) the model structure can
be dynamically adjusted accounting for the temporal variations of human
activities, i.e. the network configuration is allowed to be partially activated
during inference. For model training, we propose an EM-type optimization method
that iteratively (i) discovers the latent structure by determining the
decomposed actions for each training example, and (ii) learns the network
parameters by using the back-propagation algorithm. Our approach is validated
in challenging scenarios, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. A large
human activity database of RGB-D videos is presented in addition.
