The interest in action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last years. In this paper, we present a survey on current deep learning methodologies for action and gesture recognition in image sequences. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning for approaching both tasks. We review the details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions. We summarize and discuss the main works proposed so far with particular interest on how they treat the temporal dimension of data, discussing their main features and identify opportunities and challenges for future research.

Pain is a symptom of many disorders associated with actual or potential tissue damage in human body. Managing pain is not only a duty but also highly cost prone. The most primitive state of pain management is the assessment of pain. Traditionally it was accomplished by self-report or visual inspection by experts. However, automatic pain assessment systems from facial videos are also rapidly evolving due to the need of managing pain in a robust and cost effective way. Among different challenges of automatic pain assessment from facial video data two issues are increasingly prevalent: first, exploiting both spatial and temporal information of the face to assess pain level, and second, incorporating multiple visual modalities to capture complementary face information related to pain. Most works in the literature focus on merely exploiting spatial information on chromatic (RGB) video data on shallow learning scenarios. However, employing deep learning techniques for spatio-temporal analysis considering Depth (D) and Thermal (T) along with RGB has high potential in this area. In this paper, we present the first state-of-the-art publicly available database, 'Multimodal Intensity Pain (MIntPAIN)' database, for RGBDT pain level recognition in sequences. We provide a first baseline results including 5 pain levels recognition by analyzing independent visual modalities and their fusion with CNN and LSTM models. From the experimental evaluation we observe that fusion of modalities helps to enhance recognition performance of pain levels in comparison to isolated ones. In particular, the combination of RGB, D, and T in an early fusion fashion achieved the best recognition rate.

Automatic pain detection is a long expected solution to a prevalent medical problem of pain management. This is more relevant when the subject of pain is young children or patients with limited ability to communicate about their pain experience. Computer vision-based analysis of facial pain expression provides a way of efficient pain detection. When deep machine learning methods came into the scene, automatic pain detection exhibited even better performance. In this paper, we figured out three important factors to exploit in automatic pain detection: spatial information available regarding to pain in each of the facial video frames, temporal axis information regarding to pain expression pattern in a subject video sequence, and variation of face resolution. We employed a combination of convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network to setup a deep hybrid pain detection framework that is able to exploit both spatial and temporal pain information from facial video. In order to analyze the effect of different facial resolutions, we introduce a super-resolution algorithm to generate facial video frames with different resolution setups. We investigated the performance on the publicly available UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain database. As a contribution, the paper provides novel and important information regarding to the performance of a hybrid deep learning framework for pain detection in facial images of different resolution.

Interest in automatic action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last few years. This is due in part to the large number of application domains for this type of technology. As in many other computer vision areas, deep learning based methods have quickly become a reference methodology for obtaining state-of-the-art performance in both tasks. This chapter is a survey of current deep learning based methodologies for action and gesture recognition in sequences of images. The survey reviews both fundamental and cutting edge methodologies reported in the last few years. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning for approaching both tasks. Details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions are reviewed. *. A reduced version of this appeared appeared as: M. Asadi-Aghbolaghi et al. A survey on deep learning based approaches for action and gesture recognition in image sequences. In