Manipulation Pattern Discovery: A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach

We aim to unsupervisedly discover human's action (motion) patterns of manipulating various objects in scenarios such as assisted living. We are motivated by two key observations. First, large variation exists in motion patterns associated with various types of objects being manipulated, thus manually defining motion primitives is infeasible. Second, some motion patterns are shared among different objects being manipulated while others are object specific. We therefore propose a nonparametric Bayesian method that adopts a hierarchical Dirichlet process prior to learn representative manipulation (motion) patterns in an unsupervised manner. Taking easy-to-obtain object detection score maps and dense motion trajectories as inputs, the proposed probabilistic model can discover motion pattern groups associated with different types of objects being manipulated with a shared manipulation pattern dictionary. The size of the learned dictionary is automatically inferred. Comprehensive experiments on two assisted living benchmarks and a cooking motion dataset demonstrate superiority of our learned manipulation pattern dictionary in representing manipulation actions for recognition.