Orientation Aware - Human Action Recognition

Our method leverages motion cues of multiple camera viewpoints and textual descriptions of human actions in the training phase to handle geometric domain gaps between the training and test sets.

Introduction

This is the source code for the website of the paper "Cross-Domain Human Action Recognition from Multiview Motion and Textual Descriptions".

The paper is accepted to ICPR 2026.

Abstract:

Robustness to domain changes is a key capability for effective deployment of human action recognition systems in real-world scenarios, where action categories at inference can present important domain shifts or even unseen actions from training. In this context, improving the recognition capabilities of Zero-Shot Action Recognition models (ZSAR), without requiring strong annotation efforts, remains a central challenge. Most ZSAR approaches assume that actions are observed under geometric conditions similar to those seen during training. In practice, variations in human body orientation and camera viewpoint add a significant domain gap in ZSAR, substantially limiting generalization to novel action?motion combinations. In this context, this paper presents a novel orientation-aware action recognition approach with improved cross-domain capabilities. Our approach combines motion cues of multiple camera viewpoints and text descriptions of human actions in the training phase. We present a new orientation-aware motion encoding network to learn different motion features, and adapt a specific orientation-aware text prompt to match the corresponding features at inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves ZSAR performance across different recognition benchmarks, outperforming recent state-of-the-art zero-shot approaches on NTU-RGB+D, BABEL, NW-UCLA, and on two surveillance datasets. In addition, the learned representations exhibit strong transfer learning capabilities, yielding competitive performance on both cross-domain and same-domain recognition of seen actions.

Code

The source code of the method described in the paper is here.

Citation

If you find this code useful for your research, please cite the paper:

@article{porto2026cdhar,
  title={Cross-Domain Human Action Recognition from Multiview Motion and Textual Descriptions},
  author={Porto, Martins and Chalumeau, Demonceaux},
  journal={ICPR},
  year={2026}
}

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by grants from projects ANER MOVIS from ``Conseil Regional de Bourgogne-Franche-Comte'' and ANR MANYVIS (ANR-23-CE23-0003-01), to whom we are grateful.

ICB: Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne