Unsupervised Feature Enrichment and Fidelity Preservation Learning Framework for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

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Chuankun Li, Shuai Li, Yanbo Gao, Xingyu Gao, Ping Chen, Jian Li, Wanqing Li

Published: 01 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 05 Nov 2025IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition has achieved remarkable progress recently. Existing unsupervised learning methods suffer from severe overfitting problem, and thus small networks are used, significantly reducing the representation capability. To address this problem, the overfitting mechanism behind the unsupervised learning for skeleton-based action recognition is first investigated. It is observed that skeleton is already a relatively high-level and low-dimension feature, but not in the same manifold as the features for action recognition. Simply applying the existing unsupervised learning method tends to produce features that discriminate the different samples rather than action classes, resulting in the overfitting problem. To address this problem, this paper proposes an Unsupervised spatial-temporal Feature Enrichment and Fidelity Preservation (U-FEFP) learning framework to generate rich distributed features that contain all the information of a skeleton sample. A spatial-temporal feature transformation subnetwork is developed using channel-wise topology refinement graph convolutional block and graph convolutional gated recurrent unit block as the basic feature extraction network. The unsupervised Bootstrap Your Own Latent-based learning is utilized to generate rich distributed features, and the unsupervised pretext task-based learning is employed to preserve the information contained in the skeleton. The two unsupervised learning ways are collaborated as U-FEFP to produce robust and discriminative representations. Experimental results on four widely used benchmarks, namely NTU-RGB+D-60, PKU-MMD, NTU-RGB+D-120 and AAV-Human dataset, demonstrate that the proposed U-FEFP obtains the best result compared with the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods.