Helmets are essential for the safety of a motorcycle rider, however, the enforcement of helmet wearing is a time-consuming labour intensive task. A system for the automatic classification and tracking of motorcycle riders with and without helmets is therefore described and tested. The system uses support vector machines trained on histograms derived from head region image data of motorcycle riders using both static photographs and individual image frames from video data. The trained classifier is incorporated into a tracking system where motorcycle riders are automatically segmented from video data using background subtraction. The heads of the riders are isolated and then classified using the trained classifier. Each motorcycle rider results in a sequence of regions in adjacent time frames called tracks. These tracks are then classified as a whole using a mean of the individual classifier results. Tests show that the classifier is able to accurately classify whether riders are wearing helmets or not on static photographs. Tests on the tracking system also demonstrate the validity and usefulness of the classification approach.

Human action recognition targets recognising different actions from a sequence of observations and different environmental conditions. A wide different applications is applicable to vision based action recognition research. This can include video surveillance, tracking, health care, and human–computer interaction. However, accurate and effective vision based recognition systems continue to be a big challenging area of research in the field of computer vision. This review introduces the most recent human action recognition systems and provides the advances of state-of-the-art methods. To this end, the direction of this research is sorted out from hand-crafted representation based methods including holistic and local representation methods with various sources of data, to a deep learning technology including discriminative and generative models and multi-modality based methods. Next, the most common datasets of human action recognition are presented. This review introduces several analyses, comparisons and recommendations that help to find out the direction of future research.

A wide range of techniques exist to help control the thermal comfort of an occupant in indoor environments. A novel technique is presented here to adaptively estimate the occupant’s metabolic rate. This is performed by utilising occupant’s actions using computer vision system to identify the activity of an occupant. Recognized actions are then translated into metabolic rates. The widely used Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) thermal comfort index is computed using the adaptivey estimated metabolic rate value. The PMV is then used as an input to a fuzzy control system. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using simulations of various activities. The integration of PMV thermal comfort index and action recognition system gives the opportunity to adaptively control occupant’s thermal comfort without the need to attach a sensor on an occupant all the time. The obtained results are compared with the results for the case of using one or two fixed metabolic rates. The included results appear to show improved performance, even in the presence of errors in the action recognition system.