We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.) as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM HCRF- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations. In combination with complimentary features, we report state-of-the-art results on these datasets.
Nguyen al @cite_12 proposed a latent SVM based algorithm for classifying and localizing events in a time-series. They later proposed a fully supervised structured SVM for predicting Action Unit segments in video sequences @cite_20 . Our algorithm differs from @cite_12 , while they use simple MIL, we detect multiple prototypical segments and further learn their temporal ordering. MIL based algorithm has also been used for predicting pain @cite_25 . In recent works, MIL has been used with HMM @cite_29 and also to learn embedding for multiple concepts @cite_6 for predicting facial expressions. Rudovic al @cite_17 proposed a CRF based model that accounted for ordinal relationships between expression intensities. Our work differs from this work in handling weakly labeled data and modeling the ordinal sequence between sub-events (see ).
@cite_29 @cite_6 @cite_12 @cite_25 @cite_20 @cite_17
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We present a compositional model for video event detection. A video is modeled using a collection of both global and segment-level features and kernel functions are employed for similarity comparisons. The locations of salient, discriminative video segments are treated as a latent variable, allowing the model to explicitly ignore portions of the video that are unimportant for classification. A novel, multiple kernel learning (MKL) latent support vector machine (SVM) is defined, that is used to combine and re-weight multiple feature types in a principled fashion while simultaneously operating within the latent variable framework. The compositional nature of the proposed model allows it to respond directly to the challenges of temporal clutter and intra-class variation, which are prevalent in unconstrained internet videos. Experimental results on the TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection 2011 (MED11) dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the method. We propose a weakly-supervised structured learning approach for recognition and spatio-temporal localization of actions in video. As part of the proposed approach, we develop a generalization of the Max-Path search algorithm which allows us to efficiently search over a structured space of multiple spatio-temporal paths while also incorporating context information into the model. Instead of using spatial annotations in the form of bounding boxes to guide the latent model during training, we utilize human gaze data in the form of a weak supervisory signal. This is achieved by incorporating eye gaze, along with the classification, into the structured loss within the latent SVM learning framework. Experiments on a challenging benchmark dataset, UCF-Sports, show that our model is more accurate, in terms of classification, and achieves state-of-the-art results in localization. In addition, our model can produce top-down saliency maps conditioned on the classification label and localized latent paths. This paper describes a discriminatively trained, multiscale, deformable part model for object detection. Our system achieves a two-fold improvement in average precision over the best performance in the 2006 PASCAL person detection challenge. It also outperforms the best results in the 2007 challenge in ten out of twenty categories. The system relies heavily on deformable parts. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL challenge. Our system also relies heavily on new methods for discriminative training. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM, like a hidden CRF, leads to a non-convex training problem. However, a latent SVM is semi-convex and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. We believe that our training methods will eventually make possible the effective use of more latent information such as hierarchical (grammar) models and models involving latent three dimensional pose. We propose a shape-based, hierarchical part-template matching approach to simultaneous human detection and segmentation combining local part-based and global shape-template-based schemes. The approach relies on the key idea of matching a part-template tree to images hierarchically to detect humans and estimate their poses. For learning a generic human detector, a pose-adaptive feature computation scheme is developed based on a tree matching approach. Instead of traditional concatenation-style image location-based feature encoding, we extract features adaptively in the context of human poses and train a kernel-SVM classifier to separate human nonhuman patterns. Specifically, the features are collected in the local context of poses by tracing around the estimated shape boundaries. We also introduce an approach to multiple occluded human detection and segmentation based on an iterative occlusion compensation scheme. The output of our learned generic human detector can be used as an initial set of human hypotheses for the iterative optimization. We evaluate our approaches on three public pedestrian data sets (INRIA, MIT-CBCL, and USC-B) and two crowded sequences from Caviar Benchmark and Munich Airport data sets. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical discriminative approach for human action recognition. It consists of feature extraction with mutual motion pattern analysis and discriminative action modeling in the hierarchical manifold space. Hierarchical Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (HGPLVM) is employed to learn the hierarchical manifold space in which motion patterns are extracted. A cascade CRF is also presented to estimate the motion patterns in the corresponding manifold subspace, and the trained SVM classifier predicts the action label for the current observation. Using motion capture data, we test our method and evaluate how body parts make effect on human action recognition. The results on our test set of synthetic images are also presented to demonstrate the robustness. 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. This paper presents a novel method for facial expression recognition using only sequence level labeling. With facial image sequences containing multiple peaks of expression, our method aims to label these sequences and identifies expressional peaks automatically. We formulate this weakly labeled expression recognition as a multi-instance learning (MIL) problem. First, image sequences are clustered into multiple segments. After segmentation, image sequences are regarded as bags in MIL and the segments in the bags are viewed as instances. Second, bags data are used to train a discriminative classifier which combined multi-instance learning and discriminative Hidden Markov Model (HMM) learning. In our method, HMM is used to model temporal variation within segments. We conducted experiments on CK+ database and UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain Database. Experimental results on both databases show that our method can not only label the sequences effectively, but also locate apex frames of multi-peak sequences. Besides, the experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state of the art. 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. In this work, we discover the daily location-driven routines that are contained in a massive real-life human dataset collected by mobile phones. Our goal is the discovery and analysis of human routines that characterize both individual and group behaviors in terms of location patterns. We develop an unsupervised methodology based on two differing probabilistic topic models and apply them to the daily life of 97 mobile phone users over a 16-month period to achieve these goals. Topic models are probabilistic generative models for documents that identify the latent structure that underlies a set of words. Routines dominating the entire group's activities, identified with a methodology based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model, include “going to work late”, “going home early”, “working nonstop” and “having no reception (phone off)” at different times over varying time-intervals. We also detect routines which are characteristic of users, with a methodology based on the Author-Topic model. With the routines discovered, and the two methods of characterizing days and users, we can then perform various tasks. We use the routines discovered to determine behavioral patterns of users and groups of users. For example, we can find individuals that display specific daily routines, such as “going to work early” or “turning off the mobile (or having no reception) in the evenings”. We are also able to characterize daily patterns by determining the topic structure of days in addition to determining whether certain routines occur dominantly on weekends or weekdays. Furthermore, the routines discovered can be used to rank users or find subgroups of users who display certain routines. We can also characterize users based on their entropy. We compare our method to one based on clustering using K-means. Finally, we analyze an individual's routines over time to determine regions with high variations, which may correspond to specific events. In this paper, we propose a novel space-time geometric representation of human landmark configurations and derive tools for comparison and classification. We model the temporal evolution of landmarks as parametrized trajectories on the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank. Our representation has the benefit to bring naturally a second desirable quantity when comparing shapes — the spatial covariance — in addition to the conventional affine-shape representation. We derived then geometric and computational tools for rate-invariant analysis and adaptive re-sampling of trajectories, grounding on the Riemannian geometry of the underlying manifold. Specifically, our approach involves three steps: (1) landmarks are first mapped into the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank to build time-parameterized trajectories; (2) a temporal warping is performed on the trajectories, providing a geometry-aware (dis-)similarity measure between them; (3) finally, a pairwise proximity function SVM is used to classify them, incorporating the (dis-)similarity measure into the kernel function. We show that such representation and metric achieve competitive results in applications as action recognition and emotion recognition from 3D skelet al data, and facial expression recognition from videos. Experiments have been conducted on several publicly available up-to-date benchmarks. We propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to the problem of jointly modeling multiple related time series. Our model discovers a latent set of dynamical behaviors shared among the sequences, and segments each time series into regions defined by a subset of these behaviors. Using a beta process prior, the size of the behavior set and the sharing pattern are both inferred from data. We develop Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods based on the Indian buffet process representation of the predictive distribution of the beta process. Our MCMC inference algorithm efficiently adds and removes behaviors via novel split-merge moves as well as data-driven birth and death proposals, avoiding the need to consider a truncated model. We demonstrate promising results on unsupervised segmentation of human motion capture data. 1. Introduction. Classical time series analysis has generally focused on the study of a single (potentially multivariate) time series. Instead, we consider analyzing collections of related time series, motivated by the increasing abundance of such data in many domains. In this work we explore this problem by considering time series produced by motion capture sensors on the joints of people performing exercise routines. An individual recording provides a multivariate time series that can be segmented into types of exercises (e.g., jumping jacks, arm-circles, and twists). Each exercise type describes locally coherent and simple dynamics that persist over a segment of time. We have such motion capture recordings from multiple individuals, each of whom performs some subset of a global set of exercises, as shown in Figure1. Our goal is to discover the set of global exercise types (“behaviors”) and their occurrences in each individual’s data stream. We would like to take advantage of the overlap between individuals: if a jumping-jack behavior is discovered in one sequence, then it can be used to model data for other individuals. We propose a new latent variable model for scene recognition. Our approach represents a scene as a collection of region models (“parts”) arranged in a reconfigurable pattern. We partition an image into a predefined set of regions and use a latent variable to specify which region model is assigned to each image region. In our current implementation we use a bag of words representation to capture the appearance of an image region. The resulting method generalizes a spatial bag of words approach that relies on a fixed model for the bag of words in each image region. Our models can be trained using both generative and discriminative methods. In the generative setting we use the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate model parameters from a collection of images with category labels. In the discriminative setting we use a latent structural SVM (LSSVM). We note that LSSVMs can be very sensitive to initialization and demonstrate that generative training with EM provides a good initialization for discriminative training with LSSVM. This notebook paper describes our approaches for the action recognition and temporal localization tasks of the THUMOS Challenge 2015. For the action recognition task, we use the subsequence-score distribution (SSD) framework. We use the Improved Fisher Vectors (IFVs) encoding of the Improved Dense Trajectories (IDTs) to capture motion, as well as a VGG-16 deep net model to extract 4096 dimension feature vector to capture the context information. A linear SVM is trained for classification of 101 categories' action video clips. For the temporal localization task, we use the IFV encoding at 9 different temporal scales, and apply the above SVM to obtain a pyramid score descriptor. The score features are used for generating action labels at frame level, and by proper post processing we are able to detect the 20 class actions in given videos. 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. For the problem of action detection, most existing methods require that relevant portions of the action of interest in training videos have been manually annotated with bounding boxes. Some recent works tried to avoid tedious manual annotation , and proposed to automatically identify the relevant portions in training videos. However, these methods only concerned the identification in either spatial or temporal domain, and may get irrelevant contents from another domain. These irrelevant contents are usually undesirable in the training phase, which will lead to a degradation of the detection performance. This paper advances prior work by proposing a joint learning framework to simultaneously identify the spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest in training videos. To get pixel-level localization results, our method uses dense trajectories extracted from videos as local features to represent actions. We first present a trajectory split-and-merge algorithm to segment a video into the background and several separated foreground moving objects. In this algorithm, the inherent temporal smoothness of human actions is exploited to facilitate segmentation. Then, with the latent SVM framework on segmentation results, spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest are treated as latent variables that are inferred simultaneously with action recognition. Experiments on two challenging datasets show that action detection with our learned spatial and temporal extents is superior than state-of-the-art methods. 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. We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.) as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM HCRF- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations. In combination with complimentary features, we report state-of-the-art results on these datasets. Modeling the temporal structure of sub-activities is an important yet challenging problem in complex activity classification. This paper proposes a latent hierarchical model (LHM) to describe the decomposition of complex activity into sub-activities in a hierarchical way. The LHM has a tree-structure, where each node corresponds to a video segment (sub-activity) at certain temporal scale. The starting and ending time points of each sub-activity are represented by two latent variables, which are automatically determined during the inference process. We formulate the training problem of the LHM in a latent kernelized SVM framework and develop an efficient cascade inference method to speed up classification. The advantages of our methods come from: 1) LHM models the complex activity with a deep structure, which is decomposed into sub-activities in a coarse-to-fine manner and 2) the starting and ending time points of each segment are adaptively determined to deal with the temporal displacement and duration variation of sub-activity. We conduct experiments on three datasets: 1) the KTH; 2) the Hollywood2; and 3) the Olympic Sports. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the LHM in complex activity classification. With dense features, our LHM achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the Hollywood2 dataset and the Olympic Sports dataset. We present a VAE architecture for encoding and generating high dimensional sequential data, such as video or audio. Our deep generative model learns a latent representation of the data which is split into a static and dynamic part, allowing us to approximately disentangle latent time-dependent features (dynamics) from features which are preserved over time (content). This architecture gives us partial control over generating content and dynamics by conditioning on either one of these sets of features. In our experiments on artificially generated cartoon video clips and voice recordings, we show that we can convert the content of a given sequence into another one by such content swapping. For audio, this allows us to convert a male speaker into a female speaker and vice versa, while for video we can separately manipulate shapes and dynamics. Furthermore, we give empirical evidence for the hypothesis that stochastic RNNs as latent state models are more efficient at compressing and generating long sequences than deterministic ones, which may be relevant for applications in video compression. Abstract We describe algorithms for recognizing human motion in monocular video sequences, based on discriminative conditional random fields (CRFs) and maximum entropy Markov models (MEMMs). Existing approaches to this problem typically use generative structures like the hidden Markov model (HMM). Therefore, they have to make simplifying, often unrealistic assumptions on the conditional independence of observations given the motion class labels and cannot accommodate rich overlapping features of the observation or long-term contextual dependencies among observations at multiple timesteps. This makes them prone to myopic failures in recognizing many human motions, because even the transition between simple human activities naturally has temporal segments of ambiguity and overlap. The correct interpretation of these sequences requires more holistic, contextual decisions, where the estimate of an activity at a particular timestep could be constrained by longer windows of observations, prior and even posterior to that timestep. This would not be computationally feasible with a HMM which requires the enumeration of a number of observation sequences exponential in the size of the context window. In this work we follow a different philosophy: instead of restrictively modeling the complex image generation process – the observation, we work with models that can unrestrictedly take it as an input, hence condition on it. Conditional models like the proposed CRFs seamlessly represent contextual dependencies and have computationally attractive properties: they support efficient, exact recognition using dynamic programming, and their parameters can be learned using convex optimization. We introduce conditional graphical models as complementary tools for human motion recognition and present an extensive set of experiments that show not only how these can successfully classify diverse human activities like walking, jumping, running, picking or dancing, but also how they can discriminate among subtle motion styles like normal walks and wander walks.