  This paper aims at one newly raising task in vision and multimedia research:
recognizing human actions from still images. Its main challenges lie in the
large variations in human poses and appearances, as well as the lack of
temporal motion information. Addressing these problems, we propose to develop
an expressive deep model to naturally integrate human layout and surrounding
contexts for higher level action understanding from still images. In
particular, a Deep Belief Net is trained to fuse information from different
noisy sources such as body part detection and object detection. To bridge the
semantic gap, we used manually labeled data to greatly improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of the pre-training and fine-tuning stages of the
DBN training. The resulting framework is shown to be robust to sometimes
unreliable inputs (e.g., imprecise detections of human parts and objects), and
outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
