Human Action Recognition (HAR) is an interesting and helpful topic in various real-life applications such as surveillance based security system, computer vision and robotics. The selected features and feature representation methods, classification algorithms decides the accuracy of the HAR systems. A new feature called, Skeletonized STIP (Spatio Temporal Interest Points) is identified and used in this work. The skeletonization on the action video’s foreground frames are performed and the new feature is generated as STIP values of the skeleton frame sequence. Then the feature set is used for initial dictionary construction in sparse coding. The data for action recognition is huge, since the feature set is represented using the sparse representation. To refine the sparse representation the max pooling method is used and the action recognition is performed using SVM classifier. The proposed approach outperforms on the benchmark datasets.

PurposeTo find a successful human action recognition system (HAR) for the unmanned environments.Design/methodology/approachThis paper describes the key technology of an efficient HAR system. In this paper, the advancements for three key steps of the HAR system are presented to improve the accuracy of the existing HAR systems. The key steps are feature extraction, feature descriptor and action classification, which are implemented and analyzed. The usage of the implemented HAR system in the self-driving car is summarized. Finally, the results of the HAR system and other existing action recognition systems are compared.FindingsThis paper exhibits the proposed modification and improvements in the HAR system, namely the skeleton-based spatiotemporal interest points (STIP) feature and the improved discriminative sparse descriptor for the identified feature and the linear action classification.Research limitations/implicationsThe experiments are carried out on captured benchmark data sets and need to be analyzed in a real-time environment.Practical implicationsThe middleware support between the proposed HAR system and the self-driven car system provides several other challenging opportunities in research.Social implicationsThe authors’ work provides the way to go a step ahead in machine vision especially in self-driving cars.Originality/valueThe method for extracting the new feature and constructing an improved discriminative sparse feature descriptor has been introduced.