This review article surveys extensively the current progresses made toward video-based human activity recognition. Three aspects for human activity recognition are addressed including core technology, human activity recognition systems, and applications from low-level to high-level representation. In the core technology, three critical processing stages are thoroughly discussed mainly: human object segmentation, feature extraction and representation, activity detection and classification algorithms. In the human activity recognition systems, three main types are mentioned, including single person activity recognition, multiple people interaction and crowd behavior, and abnormal activity recognition. Finally the domains of applications are discussed in detail, specifically, on surveillance environments, entertainment environments and healthcare systems. Our survey, which aims to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the field, also addresses several challenges associated with these systems and applications. Moreover, in this survey, various applications are discussed in great detail, specifically, a survey on the applications in healthcare monitoring systems.

Human action recognition is used in areas such as surveillance, entertainment, and healthcare. This paper proposes a system to recognize both single and continuous human actions from monocular video sequences, based on 3D human modeling and cyclic hidden Markov models (CHMMs). First, for each frame in a monocular video sequence, the 3D coordinates of joints belonging to a human object, through actions of multiple cycles, are extracted using 3D human modeling techniques. The 3D coordinates are then converted into a set of geometrical relational features (GRFs) for dimensionality reduction and discrimination increase. For further dimensionality reduction, k-means clustering is applied to the GRFs to generate clustered feature vectors. These vectors are used to train CHMMs separately for different types of actions, based on the Baum–Welch re-estimation algorithm. For recognition of continuous actions that are concatenated from several distinct types of actions, a designed graphical model is used to systematically concatenate different separately trained CHMMs. The experimental results show the effective performance of our proposed system in both single and continuous action recognition problems.