Predicting the intended action using internal simulation of perception

Abstract: This article proposes an architecture, which allows the prediction of intention by internally simulating perceptual states represented by action pattern vectors. To this end, associative self-organising neural networks (A-SOM) is utilised to build a hierarchical cognitive architecture for recognition and simulation of the skeleton based human actions. The abilities of the proposed architecture in recognising and predicting actions is evaluated in experiments using three different datasets of 3D actions. Based on the experiments of this article, applying internally simulated perceptual states represented by action pattern vectors improves the performance of the recognition task in all experiments. Furthermore, internal simulation of perception addresses the problem of having limited access to the sensory input, and also the future prediction of the consecutive perceptual sequences. The performance of the system is compared and discussed with similar architecture using self-organizing neural networks (SOM).