# Human Action Recognition (HAR) Using Skeleton-based Spatial Temporal Relative Transformer Network: ST-RTR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23806/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Geometric deep learning: going beyond Euclidean data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08097/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [Spatio-Temporal LSTM with Trust Gates for 3D Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07043/) (2016)
- [Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01189/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Attention Model for Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06067/) (2016)
- [Co-occurrence Feature Learning from Skeleton Data for Action Recognition and Detection with Hierarchical Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06055/) (2018)
- [View Adaptive Recurrent Neural Networks for High Performance Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08274/) (2017)
- [UAV-Human: A Large Benchmark for Human Behavior Understanding with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00946/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition with Global Context-Aware Attention LSTM Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05740/) (2017)
- [Parameter Efficient Multimodal Transformers for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04124/) (2020)
- [Modeling Temporal Dynamics and Spatial Configurations of Actions Using Two-Stream Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02581/) (2017)
- [A Survey on 3D Skeleton-Based Action Recognition Using Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05907/) (2020)
- [Skeleton based action recognition using translation-scale invariant image mapping and multi-scale deep cnn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05645/) (2017)
- [Fusing Higher-order Features in Graph Neural Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01563/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human Action Recognition (HAR) is an interesting research area in human-computer interaction used to monitor the activities of elderly and disabled individuals affected by physical and mental health. In the recent era, skeleton-based HAR has received much attention because skeleton data has shown that it can handle changes in striking, body size, camera views, and complex backgrounds. One key characteristic of ST-GCN is automatically learning spatial and temporal patterns from skeleton sequences. It has some limitations, as this method only works for short-range correlation due to its limited receptive field. Consequently, understanding human action requires long-range interconnection. To address this issue, we developed a spatial-temporal relative transformer ST-RTR model. The ST-RTR includes joint and relay nodes, which allow efficient communication and data transmission within the network. These nodes help to break the inherent spatial and temporal skeleton topologies, which enables the model to understand long-range human action better. Furthermore, we combine ST-RTR with a fusion model for further performance improvements. To assess the performance of the ST-RTR method, we conducted experiments on three skeleton-based HAR benchmarks: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and UAV-Human. It boosted CS and CV by 2.11 % and 1.45% on NTU RGB+D 60, 1.25% and 1.05% on NTU RGB+D 120. On UAV-Human datasets, accuracy improved by 2.54%. The experimental outcomes explain that the proposed ST-RTR model significantly improves action recognition associated with the standard ST-GCN method.