  The recognition of actions from video sequences has many applications in
health monitoring, assisted living, surveillance, and smart homes. Despite
advances in sensing, in particular related to 3D video, the methodologies to
process the data are still subject to research. We demonstrate superior results
by a system which combines recurrent neural networks with convolutional neural
networks in a voting approach. The gated-recurrent-unit-based neural networks
are particularly well-suited to distinguish actions based on long-term
information from optical tracking data; the 3D-CNNs focus more on detailed,
recent information from video data. The resulting features are merged in an SVM
which then classifies the movement. In this architecture, our method improves
recognition rates of state-of-the-art methods by 14% on standard data sets.
