Multi-stream pose convolutional neural networks for human interaction recognition in images

Recognizing human interactions in still images is quite a challenging task since compared to videos, there is only a glimpse of interaction in a single image. This work investigates the role of human poses in recognizing human–human interactions in still images. To this end, a multi-stream convolutional neural network architecture is proposed, which fuses different levels of human pose information to recognize human interactions better. In this context, several pose-based representations are explored. Experimental evaluations in an extended benchmark dataset show that the proposed multi-stream pose Convolutional Neural Network is successful in discriminating a wide range of human–human interactions and human poses when used in conjunction with the overall context provides discriminative cues about human–human interactions.