  An unsupervised human action modeling framework can provide useful
pose-sequence representation, which can be utilized in a variety of pose
analysis applications. In this work we propose a novel temporal pose-sequence
modeling framework, which can embed the dynamics of 3D human-skeleton joints to
a continuous latent space in an efficient manner. In contrast to end-to-end
framework explored by previous works, we disentangle the task of individual
pose representation learning from the task of learning actions as a trajectory
in pose embedding space. In order to realize a continuous pose embedding
manifold with improved reconstructions, we propose an unsupervised, manifold
learning procedure named Encoder GAN, (or EnGAN). Further, we use the pose
embeddings generated by EnGAN to model human actions using a bidirectional RNN
auto-encoder architecture, PoseRNN. We introduce first-order gradient loss to
explicitly enforce temporal regularity in the predicted motion sequence. A
hierarchical feature fusion technique is also investigated for simultaneous
modeling of local skeleton joints along with global pose variations. We
demonstrate state-of-the-art transfer-ability of the learned representation
against other supervisedly and unsupervisedly learned motion embeddings for the
task of fine-grained action recognition on SBU interaction dataset. Further, we
show the qualitative strengths of the proposed framework by visualizing
skeleton pose reconstructions and interpolations in pose-embedding space, and
low dimensional principal component projections of the reconstructed pose
trajectories.
