  Human action recognition in 3D skeleton sequences has attracted a lot of
research attention. Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown
promising performance in this task due to their strengths in modeling the
dependencies and dynamics in sequential data. As not all skeletal joints are
informative for action recognition, and the irrelevant joints often bring noise
which can degrade the performance, we need to pay more attention to the
informative ones. However, the original LSTM network does not have explicit
attention ability. In this paper, we propose a new class of LSTM network,
Global Context-Aware Attention LSTM (GCA-LSTM), for skeleton based action
recognition. This network is capable of selectively focusing on the informative
joints in each frame of each skeleton sequence by using a global context memory
cell. To further improve the attention capability of our network, we also
introduce a recurrent attention mechanism, with which the attention performance
of the network can be enhanced progressively. Moreover, we propose a stepwise
training scheme in order to train our network effectively. Our approach
achieves state-of-the-art performance on five challenging benchmark datasets
for skeleton based action recognition.
