  Existing techniques for 3D action recognition are sensitive to viewpoint
variations because they extract features from depth images which are viewpoint
dependent. In contrast, we directly process pointclouds for cross-view action
recognition from unknown and unseen views. We propose the Histogram of Oriented
Principal Components (HOPC) descriptor that is robust to noise, viewpoint,
scale and action speed variations. At a 3D point, HOPC is computed by
projecting the three scaled eigenvectors of the pointcloud within its local
spatio-temporal support volume onto the vertices of a regular dodecahedron.
HOPC is also used for the detection of Spatio-Temporal Keypoints (STK) in 3D
pointcloud sequences so that view-invariant STK descriptors (or Local HOPC
descriptors) at these key locations only are used for action recognition. We
also propose a global descriptor computed from the normalized spatio-temporal
distribution of STKs in 4-D, which we refer to as STK-D. We have evaluated the
performance of our proposed descriptors against nine existing techniques on two
cross-view and three single-view human action recognition datasets. The
Experimental results show that our techniques provide significant improvement
over state-of-the-art methods.
