Skeleton-based Group Activity Recognition via Spatial-Temporal Panoramic Graph

Group Activity Recognition (GAR) aims to understand collective activities from videos. Existing solutions for GAR primarily rely on the RGB modality, which encounters challenges such as background variations, occlusions, motion blurs, and significant computational overhead, particularly in dynamic scenarios like sporting events. Meanwhile, current keypoint-based methods offer a lightweight and informative representation of human motions but necessitate accurate individual annotations and specialized interaction reasoning modules. To address these limitations, we design a panoramic graph that incorporates multi-person skeletons and objects to encapsulate group activity, offering an effective alternative to RGB video. This panoramic graph enables Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to unify intra-person, inter-person, and person-object interactive modeling through spatial-temporal graph convolutions. In practice, we develop a novel pipeline that extracts skeleton coordinates using pose estimation and tracking algorithms and employ Multi-person Panoramic GCN (MP-GCN) to predict group activities. Extensive experiments on Volleyball and NBA datasets demonstrate that the MP-GCN achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Notably, our method outperforms video-based approaches by using only estimated 2D keypoints as input.