In this paper, we propose a framework for recognizing human activities that uses only in-topic dominant codewords and a mixture of intertopic vectors. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is used to develop approximations of human motion primitives; these are mid-level representations, and they adaptively integrate dominant vectors when classifying human activities. In LDA topic modeling, action videos (documents) are represented by a bag-of-words (input from a dictionary), and these are based on improved dense trajectories. The output topics correspond to human motion primitives, such as finger moving or subtle leg motion. We eliminate the impurities, such as missed tracking or changing light conditions, in each motion primitive. The assembled vector of motion primitives is an improved representation of the action. We demonstrate our method on four different datasets.
The first noteworthy work in action recognition proposed the use of STIP (Laptev, 2005). This idea extends the Harris corner detector into the time @math domain, and improvements using expanded feature representations were proposed in @cite_11 , @cite_12 , and @cite_24 . As another way of representing spatiotemporal features, @cite_4 adopted a Gaussian mixture model to capture the frequency of each feature. In that approach method, primitive features are grouped separately when classifying activities. However, thus far, the best approach for action recognition is arguably the DT approach (, 2013), which is based on descriptions of the trajectories of tracked feature points, which are densely sampled. When obtaining these trajectories, the following spatiotemporal features are used: the trajectory histograms of oriented gradients (HOG; Dalal and Triggs, 2005), histograms of optical flow (HOF; , 2008), and the motion boundary histograms (MBH; , 2006)].
@cite_24 @cite_4 @cite_12 @cite_11
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This paper presents an approach for human action recognition by finding the discriminative key frames from a video sequence and representing them with the distribution of local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. In this approach, the key frames of the video sequence are selected by their discriminative power and represented by the local motion features detected in them and integrated from their temporal neighbors. In the key frame’s representation, the spatial arrangements of the motion features are captured in a hierarchical spatial pyramid structure. By using frame by frame voting for the recognition, experiments have demonstrated improved performances over most of the other known methods on the popular benchmark data sets. Recognizinghumanactionfromimagesequencesis an appealingyet challengingproblem in computer vision with many applications including motion capture, human-computer interaction, environment control, and security surveillance. In this paper, we focus on recognizing the activities of a person in an image sequence from local motion features and their spatiotemporal arrangements. Our approach is motivated by the recent success of “bag-of-words” model for general object recognition in computer vision[21, 14]. This representation, which is adapted from the text retrieval literature, models the object by the distribution of words from a fixed visual code book, which is usually obtained by vector quantization of local image visual features. However, this method discards the spatial and the temporal relations among these visual features, which could be helpful in object recognition. Addressing this problem, our approach uses a hierarchical representation for the key frames of a given video sequence to integrate information from both the spatial and the temporal domains. We first apply a spatiotemporal feature detector to the video sequence and obtain the local motion features. Then we generate a visual word code book by quantization of the local motion features and assign a word label to each of them. Next we select key frames of the video sequence by their discriminative power. Then, for each key frame, we integrate the visual words from its nearby frames, divide the key frame spatially into finer subdivisions and compute in each cell the histograms of the visual words detected in this key frame and its temporal neighbors. Finally, we concatenate the histograms from all cells and use In this paper we propose a novel method for human action recognition based on boosted key-frame selection and correlated pyramidal motion feature representations. Instead of using an unsupervised method to detect interest points, a Pyramidal Motion Feature (PMF), which combines optical flow with a biologically inspired feature, is extracted from each frame of a video sequence. The AdaBoost learning algorithm is then applied to select the most discriminative frames from a large feature pool. In this way, we obtain the top-ranked boosted frames of each video sequence as the key frames which carry the most representative motion information. Furthermore, we utilise the correlogram which focuses not only on probabilistic distributions within one frame but also on the temporal relationships of the action sequence. In the classification phase, a Support-Vector Machine (SVM) is adopted as the final classifier for human action recognition. To demonstrate generalizability, our method has been systematically tested on a variety of datasets and shown to be more effective and accurate for action recognition compared to the previous work. We obtain overall accuracies of: 95.5 , 93.7 , and 36.5 with our proposed method on the KTH, the multiview IXMAS and the challenging HMDB51 datasets, respectively. Suitable feature representation is essential for performing video analysis and understanding in applications within the smart surveillance domain. In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal feature descriptor based on co-occurrence matrices computed from the optical flow magnitude and orientation. Our method, called Optical Flow Co-occurrence Matrices (OFCM), extracts a robust set of measures known as Haralick features to describe the flow patterns by measuring meaningful properties such as contrast, entropy and homogeneity of co-occurrence matrices to capture local space-time characteristics of the motion through the neighboring optical flow magnitude and orientation. We evaluate the proposed method on the action recognition problem by applying a visual recognition pipeline involving bag of local spatiotemporal features and SVM classification. The experimental results, carried on three well-known datasets (KTH, UCF Sports and HMDB51), demonstrate that OFCM outperforms the results achieved by several widely employed spatiotemporal feature descriptors such as HOF, HOG3D and MBH, indicating its suitability to be used as video representation. Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques. Human activity recognition based on RGB-D data has received more attention in recent years. We propose a spatiotemporal feature named three-dimensional (3D) sparse motion scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) from RGB-D data for activity recognition. First, we build pyramids as scale space for each RGB and depth frame, and then use Shi-Tomasi corner detector and sparse optical flow to quickly detect and track robust keypoints around the motion pattern in the scale space. Subsequently, local patches around keypoints, which are extracted from RGB-D data, are used to build 3D gradient and motion spaces. Then SIFT-like descriptors are calculated on both 3D spaces, respectively. The proposed feature is invariant to scale, transition, and partial occlusions. More importantly, the running time of the proposed feature is fast so that it is well-suited for real-time applications. We have evaluated the proposed feature under a bag of words model on three public RGB-D datasets: one-shot learning Chalearn Gesture Dataset, Cornell Activity Dataset-60, and MSR Daily Activity 3D dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed feature outperforms other spatiotemporal features and are comparative to other state-of-the-art approaches, even though there is only one training sample for each class. System theoretic approaches to action recognition model the dynamics of a scene with linear dynamical systems (LDSs) and perform classification using metrics on the space of LDSs, e.g. Binet-Cauchy kernels. However, such approaches are only applicable to time series data living in a Euclidean space, e.g. joint trajectories extracted from motion capture data or feature point trajectories extracted from video. Much of the success of recent object recognition techniques relies on the use of more complex feature descriptors, such as SIFT descriptors or HOG descriptors, which are essentially histograms. Since histograms live in a non-Euclidean space, we can no longer model their temporal evolution with LDSs, nor can we classify them using a metric for LDSs. In this paper, we propose to represent each frame of a video using a histogram of oriented optical flow (HOOF) and to recognize human actions by classifying HOOF time-series. For this purpose, we propose a generalization of the Binet-Cauchy kernels to nonlinear dynamical systems (NLDS) whose output lives in a non-Euclidean space, e.g. the space of histograms. This can be achieved by using kernels defined on the original non-Euclidean space, leading to a well-defined metric for NLDSs. We use these kernels for the classification of actions in video sequences using (HOOF) as the output of the NLDS. We evaluate our approach to recognition of human actions in several scenarios and achieve encouraging results. Previous work on action recognition has focused on adapting hand-designed local features, such as SIFT or HOG, from static images to the video domain. In this paper, we propose using unsupervised feature learning as a way to learn features directly from video data. More specifically, we present an extension of the Independent Subspace Analysis algorithm to learn invariant spatio-temporal features from unlabeled video data. We discovered that, despite its simplicity, this method performs surprisingly well when combined with deep learning techniques such as stacking and convolution to learn hierarchical representations. By replacing hand-designed features with our learned features, we achieve classification results superior to all previous published results on the Hollywood2, UCF, KTH and YouTube action recognition datasets. On the challenging Hollywood2 and YouTube action datasets we obtain 53.3 and 75.8 respectively, which are approximately 5 better than the current best published results. Further benefits of this method, such as the ease of training and the efficiency of training and prediction, will also be discussed. You can download our code and learned spatio-temporal features here: http: ai.stanford.edu ∼wzou Much of recent action recognition research is based on space-time interest points extracted from video using a Bag of Words (BOW) representation. It mainly relies on the discriminative power of individual local space-time descriptors, whilst ignoring potentially valuable information about the global spatio-temporal distribution of interest points. In this paper, we propose a novel action recognition approach which differs significantly from previous interest points based approaches in that only the global spatiotemporal distribution of the interest points are exploited. This is achieved through extracting holistic features from clouds of interest points accumulated over multiple temporal scales followed by automatic feature selection. Our approach avoids the non-trivial problems of selecting the optimal space-time descriptor, clustering algorithm for constructing a codebook, and selecting codebook size faced by previous interest points based methods. Our model is able to capture smooth motions, robust to view changes and occlusions at a low computation cost. Experiments using the KTH and WEIZMANN datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms most existing methods. Abstract Recognizing human actions in video sequences has been a challenging problem in the last few years due to its real-world applications. A lot of action representation approaches have been proposed to improve the action recognition performance. Despite the popularity of local features-based approaches together with “Bag-of-Words” model for action representation, it fails to capture adequate spatial or temporal relationships. In an attempt to overcome this problem, a trajectory-based local representation approaches have been proposed to capture the temporal information. This paper introduces an improvement of trajectory-based human action recognition approaches to capture discriminative temporal relationships. In our approach, we extract trajectories by tracking the detected spatio-temporal interest points named “cuboid features” with matching its SIFT descriptors over the consecutive frames. We, also, propose a linking and exploring method to obtain efficient trajectories for motion representation in realistic conditions. Then the volumes around the trajectories’ points are described to represent human actions based on the Bag-of-Words (BOW) model. Finally, a support vector machine is used to classify human actions. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was evaluated on three popular datasets (KTH, Weizmann and UCF sports). Experimental results showed that the proposed approach yields considerable performance improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches. This paper introduces a state-of-the-art video representation and applies it to efficient action recognition and detection. We first propose to improve the popular dense trajectory features by explicit camera motion estimation. More specifically, we extract feature point matches between frames using SURF descriptors and dense optical flow. The matches are used to estimate a homography with RANSAC. To improve the robustness of homography estimation, a human detector is employed to remove outlier matches from the human body as human motion is not constrained by the camera. Trajectories consistent with the homography are considered as due to camera motion, and thus removed. We also use the homography to cancel out camera motion from the optical flow. This results in significant improvement on motion-based HOF and MBH descriptors. We further explore the recent Fisher vector as an alternative feature encoding approach to the standard bag-of-words (BOW) histogram, and consider different ways to include spatial layout information in these encodings. We present a large and varied set of evaluations, considering (i) classification of short basic actions on six datasets, (ii) localization of such actions in feature-length movies, and (iii) large-scale recognition of complex events. We find that our improved trajectory features significantly outperform previous dense trajectories, and that Fisher vectors are superior to BOW encodings for video recognition tasks. In all three tasks, we show substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art results. Local spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and the resulting features from RGB videos have been proven successful at activity recognition that can handle cluttered backgrounds and partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose its counterpart in depth video and show its efficacy on activity recognition. We present a filtering method to extract STIPs from depth videos (called DSTIP) that effectively suppress the noisy measurements. Further, we build a novel depth cuboid similarity feature (DCSF) to describe the local 3D depth cuboid around the DSTIPs with an adaptable supporting size. We test this feature on activity recognition application using the public MSRAction3D, MSRDailyActivity3D datasets and our own dataset. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art activity recognition algorithms on depth videos, and the framework is more widely applicable than existing approaches. We also give detailed comparisons with other features and analysis of choice of parameters as a guidance for applications. Existing techniques for 3D action recognition are sensitive to viewpoint variations because they extract features from depth images which change significantly with viewpoint. In contrast, we directly process the pointclouds and propose a new technique for action recognition which is more robust to noise, action speed and viewpoint variations. Our technique consists of a novel descriptor and keypoint detection algorithm. The proposed descriptor is extracted at a point by encoding the Histogram of Oriented Principal Components (HOPC) within an adaptive spatio-temporal support volume around that point. Based on this descriptor, we present a novel method to detect Spatio-Temporal Key-Points (STKPs) in 3D pointcloud sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptor and STKP detector outperform state-of-the-art algorithms on three benchmark human activity datasets. We also introduce a new multiview public dataset and show the robustness of our proposed method to viewpoint variations. Existing techniques for 3D action recognition are sensitive to viewpoint variations because they extract features from depth images which are viewpoint dependent. In contrast, we directly process pointclouds for cross-view action recognition from unknown and unseen views. We propose the histogram of oriented principal components (HOPC) descriptor that is robust to noise, viewpoint, scale and action speed variations. At a 3D point, HOPC is computed by projecting the three scaled eigenvectors of the pointcloud within its local spatio-temporal support volume onto the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. HOPC is also used for the detection of spatio-temporal keypoints (STK) in 3D pointcloud sequences so that view-invariant STK descriptors (or Local HOPC descriptors) at these key locations only are used for action recognition. We also propose a global descriptor computed from the normalized spatio-temporal distribution of STKs in 4-D, which we refer to as STK-D. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed descriptors against nine existing techniques on two cross-view and three single-view human action recognition datasets. The experimental results show that our techniques provide significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods. We present a generic event detection system evaluated in the Surveillance Event Detection (SED) task of TRECVID 2012. We investigate a statistical approach with spatio-temporal features applied to seven event classes, which were defined by the SED task. This approach is based on local spatio-temporal descriptors, called MoSIFT and generated by pair-wise video frames. A Gaussian Mixture Model(GMM) is learned to model the distribution of the low level features. Then for each sliding window, the Fisher vector encoding [improvedFV] is used to generate the sample representation. The model is learnt using a Linear SVM for each event. The main novelty of our system is the introduction of Fisher vector encoding into video event detection. Fisher vector encoding has demonstrated great success in image classification. The key idea is to model the low level visual features as a Gaussian Mixture Model and to generate an intermediate vector representation for bag of features. FV encoding uses higher order statistics in place of histograms in the standard BoW. FV has several good properties: (a) it can naturally separate the video specific information from the noisy local features and (b) we can use a linear model for this representation. We build an efficient implementation for FV encoding which can attain a 10 times speed-up over real-time. We also take advantage of non-trivial object localization techniques to feed into the video event detection, e.g. multi-scale detection and non-maximum suppression. This approach outperformed the results of all other teams submissions in TRECVID SED 2012 on four of the seven event types. Realistic videos of human actions exhibit rich spatiotemporal structures at multiple levels of granularity: an action can always be decomposed into multiple finer-grained elements in both space and time. To capture this intuition, we propose to represent videos by a hierarchy of mid-level action elements (MAEs), where each MAE corresponds to an action-related spatiotemporal segment in the video. We introduce an unsupervised method to generate this representation from videos. Our method is capable of distinguishing action-related segments from background segments and representing actions at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions. Given a set of spatiotemporal segments generated from the training data, we introduce a discriminative clustering algorithm that automatically discovers MAEs at multiple levels of granularity. We develop structured models that capture a rich set of spatial, temporal and hierarchical relations among the segments, where the action label and multiple levels of MAE labels are jointly inferred. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in real-world applications such as action recognition in large-scale untrimmed videos and action parsing. In this paper, we propose a new, compact, 4D spatio-temporal “Nebula” feature to improve expression and facial movement analysis performance. Given a spatio-temporal volume, the data is voxelized and fit to a cubic polynomial. A label is assigned based on the principal curvature values, and the polar angles of the direction of least curvature are computed. The labels and angles for each feature are used to build a histogram for each region of the face. The concatenated histograms from each region give us our final feature vector. This feature description is tested on the posed expression database BU-4DFE and on a new 4D spontaneous expression database. Various region configurations, histogram sizes, and feature parameters are tested, including a non-dynamic version of the approach. The LBP-TOP approach on the texture image as well as on the depth image is also tested for comparison. The onsets of the six canonical expressions are classified for 100 subjects in BU-4DFE, while the onset, offset, and non-existence of 12 Action Units (AUs) are classified for 16 subjects from our new spontaneous database. For posed expression recognition, the Nebula feature approach shows improvement over LBPTOP on the depth images and significant improvement over the non-dynamic 3D-only approach. Moreover, the Nebula feature performs better for AU classification than the compared approaches for 11 of the AUs tested in terms of accuracy as well as Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC). A graph-based method for 3D view-invariant human action recognition is proposed.An action is represented as a sequence of graphs.The vertices can either be tracked skeleton joints or spatio-temporal keypoints.A spectral graph wavelet transform is leveraged to extract features from the graphs.The method is useful for both single- and multi-view action recognition tasks. Display Omitted We present a method for view-invariant action recognition from depth cameras based on graph signal processing techniques. Our framework leverages a novel graph representation of an action as a temporal sequence of graphs, onto which we apply a spectral graph wavelet transform for creating our feature descriptor. We evaluate two view-invariant graph types: skeleton-based and keypoint-based. The skeleton-based descriptor captures the spatial pose of the subject, whereas the keypoint-based is able to capture complementary information about human-object interaction and the shape of the point cloud. We investigate the effectiveness of our method by experiments on five publicly available datasets. By the graph structure, our method captures the temporal interaction between depth map interest points and achieves a 19.8 increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art results for cross-view action recognition, and competing results for frontal-view action recognition and human-object interaction. Namely, our method results in 90.8 accuracy on the cross-view N-UCLA Multiview Action3D dataset and 91.4 accuracy on the challenging MSRAction3D dataset in the cross-subject setting. For human-object interaction, our method achieves 72.3 accuracy on the Online RGBD Action dataset. We also achieve 96.0 and 98.8 accuracy on the MSRActionPairs3D and UCF-Kinect datasets, respectively. We present a discriminative part-based approach for human action recognition from video sequences using motion features. Our model is based on the recently proposed hidden conditional random field (HCRF) for object recognition. Similarly to HCRF for object recognition, we model a human action by a flexible constellation of parts conditioned on image observations. Differently from object recognition, our model combines both large-scale global features and local patch features to distinguish various actions. Our experimental results show that our model is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches in action recognition. In particular, our experimental results demonstrate that combining large-scale global features and local patch features performs significantly better than directly applying HCRF on local patches alone. We also propose an alternative for learning the parameters of an HCRF model in a max-margin framework. We call this method the max-margin hidden conditional random field (MMHCRF). We demonstrate that MMHCRF outperforms HCRF in human action recognition. In addition, MMHCRF can handle a much broader range of complex hidden structures arising in various problems in computer vision. This paper addresses a spatiotemporal pattern recognition problem. The main purpose of this study is to find a right representation and matching of action video volumes for categorization. A novel method is proposed to measure video-to-video volume similarity by extending Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), a principled tool to inspect linear relations between two sets of vectors, to that of two multiway data arrays (or tensors). The proposed method analyzes video volumes as inputs avoiding the difficult problem of explicit motion estimation required in traditional methods and provides a way of spatiotemporal pattern matching that is robust to intraclass variations of actions. The proposed matching is demonstrated for action classification by a simple Nearest Neighbor classifier. We, moreover, propose an automatic action detection method, which performs 3D window search over an input video with action exemplars. The search is speeded up by dynamic learning of subspaces in the proposed CCA. Experiments on a public action data set (KTH) and a self-recorded hand gesture data showed that the proposed method is significantly better than various state-of-the-art methods with respect to accuracy. Our method has low time complexity and does not require any major tuning parameters. The focus of the action understanding literature has predominately been classification, how- ever, there are many applications demanding richer action understanding such as mobile robotics and video search, with solutions to classification, localization and detection. In this paper, we propose a compositional model that leverages a new mid-level representation called compositional trajectories and a locally articulated spatiotemporal deformable parts model (LALSDPM) for fully action understanding. Our methods is advantageous in capturing the variable structure of dynamic human activity over a long range. First, the compositional trajectories capture long-ranging, frequently co-occurring groups of trajectories in space time and represent them in discriminative hierarchies, where human motion is largely separated from camera motion; second, LASTDPM learns a structured model with multi-layer deformable parts to capture multiple levels of articulated motion. We implement our methods and demonstrate state of the art performance on all three problems: action detection, localization, and recognition.