  Infrared (IR) imaging has the potential to enable more robust action
recognition systems compared to visible spectrum cameras due to lower
sensitivity to lighting conditions and appearance variability. While the action
recognition task on videos collected from visible spectrum imaging has received
much attention, action recognition in IR videos is significantly less explored.
Our objective is to exploit imaging data in this modality for the action
recognition task. In this work, we propose a novel two-stream 3D convolutional
neural network (CNN) architecture by introducing the discriminative code layer
and the corresponding discriminative code loss function. The proposed network
processes IR image and the IR-based optical flow field sequences. We pretrain
the 3D CNN model on the visible spectrum Sports-1M action dataset and finetune
it on the Infrared Action Recognition (InfAR) dataset. To our best knowledge,
this is the first application of the 3D CNN to action recognition in the IR
domain. We conduct an elaborate analysis of different fusion schemes (weighted
average, single and double-layer neural nets) applied to different 3D CNN
outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve
state-of-the-art average precision (AP) performances on the InfAR dataset: (1)
the proposed two-stream 3D CNN achieves the best reported 77.5% AP, and (2) our
3D CNN model applied to the optical flow fields achieves the best reported
single stream 75.42% AP.
