# SHARDeg: A Benchmark for Skeletal Human Action Recognition in Degraded Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18048/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (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)
- [Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Irregular Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08926/) (2020)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Spatio-Temporal LSTM with Trust Gates for 3D Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07043/) (2016)
- [Neural Rough Differential Equations for Long Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08295/) (2020)
- [SCSampler: Sampling Salient Clips from Video for Efficient Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04289/) (2019)
- [View Adaptive Recurrent Neural Networks for High Performance Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08274/) (2017)
- [A Primer on the Signature Method in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03788/) (2016)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/) (2019)
- [Image and Video Compression with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03567/) (2019)
- [SMART Frame Selection for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10671/) (2020)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Based Frame Sampling for Effective Untrimmed Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13369/) (2019)
- [SmoothNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Refining Human Poses in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13715/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Representations for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03729/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Skeleton-Based Action Recognition Using Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05907/) (2020)
- [SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09508/) (2024)
- [When Human Pose Estimation Meets Robustness: Adversarial Algorithms and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06152/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Methods for Low-Power Deep Learning and Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11066/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of Spatial-Temporal Models Against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06513/) (2021)
- [Joint-bone Fusion Graph Convolutional Network for Semi-supervised Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04075/) (2022)
- [Developing the Path Signature Methodology and its Application to Landmark-based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03993/) (2017)
- [Skeleton-based Gesture Recognition Using Several Fully Connected Layers with Path Signature Features and Temporal Transformer Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07081/) (2018)
- [RNN Fisher Vectors for Action Recognition and Image Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03958/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer vision (CV) models for detection, prediction or classification tasks operate on video data-streams that are often degraded in the real world, due to deployment in real-time or on resource-constrained hardware. It is therefore critical that these models are robust to degraded data, but state of the art (SoTA) models are often insufficiently assessed with these real-world constraints in mind. This is exemplified by Skeletal Human Action Recognition (SHAR), which is critical in many CV pipelines operating in real-time and at the edge, but robustness to degraded data has previously only been shallowly and inconsistently assessed. Here we address this issue for SHAR by providing an important first data degradation benchmark on the most detailed and largest 3D open dataset, NTU-RGB+D-120, and assess the robustness of five leading SHAR models to three forms of degradation that represent real-world issues. We demonstrate the need for this benchmark by showing that the form of degradation, which has not previously been considered, has a large impact on model accuracy; at the same effective frame rate, model accuracy can vary by >40% depending on degradation type. We also identify that temporal regularity of frames in degraded SHAR data is likely a major driver of differences in model performance, and harness this to improve performance of existing models by up to >40%, through employing a simple mitigation approach based on interpolation. Finally, we highlight how our benchmark has helped identify an important degradation-resistant SHAR model based in Rough Path Theory; the LogSigRNN SHAR model outperforms the SoTA DeGCN model in five out of six cases at low frame rates by an average accuracy of 6%, despite trailing the SoTA model by 11-12% on un-degraded data at high frame rates (30 FPS).