Which One is Better? Self-supervised Temporal Coherence Learning for Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Recently, researchers have achieved significant results in the skeleton based action recognition task. To better model the skeleton sequences, existing methods learned the feature representations in the self-supervised setting by solving pretext tasks, such as predicting the order of a shuffled skeleton sequence or verifying whether a given skeleton sequence is shuffled or not. However, these pretext tasks are either too challenging or too easy for the encoder to obtain a proper skeleton representation for action recognition. Therefore, we propose a novel self-pretraining pretext task, Which One Is Better (WOIB), to identify which one is more temporally coherent, given two shuffled skeleton sequences. Experiments on the NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and Kinetics-Skeleton datasets with different network architectures show significant improvements in recognition accuracy, demonstrating that such a well-designed pretext task is general and able to drive the encoder to learn more discriminative representations.