text: In this work, we address a challenging problem of fine-grained and coarse-grained recognition of object manipulation actions. Due to the variations in geometrical and motion constraints, there are different manipulations actions possible to perform different sets of actions with an object. Also, there are subtle movements involved to complete most of object manipulation actions. This makes the task of object manipulation action recognition difficult with only just the motion information. We propose to use grasp and motion-constraints information to recognise and understand action intention with different objects. We also provide an extensive experimental evaluation on the recent Yale Human Grasping dataset consisting of large set of 455 manipulation actions. The evaluation involves a) Different contemporary multi-class classifiers, and binary classifiers with one-vs-one multi- class voting scheme, b) Differential comparisons results based on subsets of attributes involving information of grasp and motion-constraints, c) Fine-grained and Coarse-grained object manipulation action recognition based on fine-grained as well as coarse-grained grasp type information, and d) Comparison between Instance level and Sequence level modeling of object manipulation actions. Our results justifies the efficacy of grasp attributes for the task of fine-grained and coarse-grained object manipulation action recognition.
  @cite_28: 
  @cite_14: In order to advance action generation and creation in robots beyond simple learned schemas we need computational tools that allow us to automatically interpret and represent human actions. This paper presents a system that learns manipulation action plans by processing unconstrained videos from the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN) based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp type and the other for object recognition. The higher level is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot manipulation. Experiments conducted on a publicly available unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able to learn manipulation actions by "watching" unconstrained videos with high accuracy.
  @cite_21: The grasp type provides crucial information about human action. However, recognizing the grasp type from unconstrained scenes is challenging because of the large variations in appearance, occlusions and geometric distortions. In this paper, first we present a convolutional neural network to classify functional hand grasp types. Experiments on a public static scene hand data set validate good performance of the presented method. Then we present two applications utilizing grasp type classification: (a) inference of human action intention and (b) fine level manipulation action segmentation. Experiments on both tasks demonstrate the usefulness of grasp type as a cognitive feature for computer vision. This study shows that the grasp type is a powerful symbolic representation for action understanding, and thus opens new avenues for future research.
  @cite_23: This paper describes the architecture of a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and that includes interacting modules for perception and reasoning. Our work contributes to two core problems at the heart of action understanding: (a) the grounding of relevant information about actions in perception (the perception-action integration problem), and (b) the organization of perceptual and high-level symbolic information for interpreting the actions (the sequencing problem). At the high level, actions are represented with the Manipulation Action Grammar, a context-free grammar that organizes actions as a sequence of sub events. Each sub event is described by the hand, movements, objects and tools involved, and the relevant information about these factors is obtained from biologicallyinspired perception modules. These modules track the hands and objects, and they recognize the hand grasp, objects and actions using attention, segmentation, and feature description. Experiments on a new data set of manipulation actions show that our system extracts the relevant visual information and semantic representation. This representation could further be used by the cognitive agent for reasoning, prediction, and planning.
summary: To the best of our knowledge, apart from @cite_21 , @cite_14 and @cite_23 , there has been no work using grasp information for action recognition. @cite_21 semantically group action intentions using grasp based information into three coarse and somewhat abstract classes: Force-oriented, Skill-oriented, and Casual actions. They use hand grasps recognized through convolutional neural network to understand the class of action, each image belong to. @cite_23 develop a grammatical formalism for parsing and interpreting action sequences. Their basic idea is to divide actions into sub-actions of when the object is grasped and released, or if there is change in the grasp type during the course of an action motion. This grammatical formalism provides a syntax and semantics of action, over which basic tools for understanding of actions can be developed. @cite_28 considers the problem of grasp classification on Yale human grasping dataset, again based on the coarsely defined task attributes such as force (interaction and weight), motion-constraints on objects and functional class (use and hold), whereas we propose a solution to task or manipulation action classification based on the grasp information, motion-constraints, and object class.