In this paper, we show that different body parts do not play equally important roles in recognizing a human action in video data. We investigate to what extent a body part plays a role in recognition of different actions and hence propose a generic method of assigning weights to different body points. The approach is inspired by the strong evidence in the applied perception community that humans perform recognition in a foveated manner, that is they recognize events or objects by only focusing on visually significant aspects. An important contribution of our method is that the computation of the weights assigned to body parts is invariant to viewing directions and camera parameters in the input data. We have performed extensive experiments to validate the proposed approach and demonstrate its significance. In particular, results show that considerable improvement in performance is gained by taking into account the relative importance of different body parts as defined by our approach.
One particular issue that has attracted attention among many of these groups is invariance @cite_132 @cite_57 @cite_123 @cite_66 @cite_47 @cite_133 @cite_71 @cite_47 . Invariance is an important issue in any recognition problem from image or video data, since appearance is substantially affected by the imaging level, i.e. the viewing angle, camera parameters, lighting, etc. In action recognition the issue of invariant recognition is compounded with additional complexity introduced by the high degrees of freedom of human body @cite_106 .
@cite_132 @cite_57 @cite_106 @cite_133 @cite_71 @cite_47 @cite_123 @cite_66
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This paper presents an approach for viewpoint invariant human action recognition, an area that has received scant attention so far, relative to the overall body of work in human action recognition. It has been established previously that there exist no invariants for 3D to 2D projection. However, there exist a wealth of techniques in 2D invariance that can be used to advantage in 3D to 2D projection. We exploit these techniques and model actions in terms of view-invariant canonical body poses and trajectories in 2D invariance space, leading to a simple and effective way to represent and recognize human actions from a general viewpoint. We first evaluate the approach theoretically and show why a straightforward application of the 2D invariance idea will not work. We describe strategies designed to overcome inherent problems in the straightforward approach and outline the recognition algorithm. We then present results on 2D projections of publicly available human motion capture data as well on manually segmented real image sequences. In addition to robustness to viewpoint change, the approach is robust enough to handle different people, minor variabilities in a given action, and the speed of aciton (and hence, frame-rate) while encoding sufficient distinction among actions. This paper presents an approach to view-invariant action recognition, where human poses and motions exhibit large variations across different camera viewpoints. When each viewpoint of a given set of action classes is specified as a learning task then multitask learning appears suitable for achieving view invariance in recognition. We extend the standard multitask learning to allow identifying: (1) latent groupings of action views (i.e., tasks), and (2) discriminative action parts, along with joint learning of all tasks. This is because it seems reasonable to expect that certain distinct views are more correlated than some others, and thus identifying correlated views could improve recognition. Also, part-based modeling is expected to improve robustness against self-occlusion when actors are imaged from different views. Results on the benchmark datasets show that we outperform standard multitask learning by 21.9 , and the state-of-the-art alternatives by 4.5-6 . Identifying suitable image features is a central challenge in computer vision, ranging from representations for low-level to high-level vision. Due to the difficulty of this task, techniques for learning features directly from example data have recently gained attention. Despite significant benefits, these learned features often have many fewer of the desired invariances or equivariances than their hand-crafted counterparts. While translation in- equivariance has been addressed, the issue of learning rotation-invariant or equivariant representations is hardly explored. In this paper we describe a general framework for incorporating invariance to linear image transformations into product models for feature learning. A particular benefit is that our approach induces transformation-aware feature learning, i.e. it yields features that have a notion with which specific image transformation they are used. We focus our study on rotation in- equivariance and show the advantages of our approach in learning rotation-invariant image priors and in building rotation-equivariant and invariant descriptors of learned features, which result in state-of-the-art performance for rotation-invariant object detection. This paper presents two approaches for the representation and recognition of human action in video, aiming for view-point invariance. The paper first presents new results using a 2D approach presented earlier. Inherent limitations of the 2D approach are discussed and a new 3D approach that builds on recent work on 3D model-based invariants, is presented. Each action is represented as a unique curve in a 3D invariance space, surrounded by an acceptance volume ('action volume'). Given a video sequence, 2D quantities from the image are calculated and matched against candidate action volumes in a probabilistic framework. The theory is presented followed by results on arbitrary projections of motion-capture data which demonstrate a high degree of tolerance to viewpoint change. We propose a general framework for fast and accurate recognition of actions in video using empirical covariance matrices of features. A dense set of spatio-temporal feature vectors are computed from video to provide a localized description of the action, and subsequently aggregated in an empirical covariance matrix to compactly represent the action. Two supervised learning methods for action recognition are developed using feature covariance matrices. Common to both methods is the transformation of the classification problem in the closed convex cone of covariance matrices into an equivalent problem in the vector space of symmetric matrices via the matrix logarithm. The first method applies nearest-neighbor classification using a suitable Riemannian metric for covariance matrices. The second method approximates the logarithm of a query covariance matrix by a sparse linear combination of the logarithms of training covariance matrices. The action label is then determined from the sparse coefficients. Both methods achieve state-of-the-art classification performance on several datasets, and are robust to action variability, viewpoint changes, and low object resolution. The proposed framework is conceptually simple and has low storage and computational requirements making it attractive for real-time implementation. The problem of using pictures of objects captured under ideal imaging conditions (here referred to as in vitro) to recognize objects in natural environments (in situ) is an emerging area of interest in computer vision and pattern recognition. Examples of tasks in this vein include assistive vision systems for the blind and object recognition for mobile robots; the proliferation of image databases on the web is bound to lead to more examples in the near future. Despite its importance, there is still a need for a freely available database to facilitate study of this kind of training testing dichotomy. In this work one of our contributions is a new multimedia database of 120 grocery products, GroZi-120. For every product, two different recordings are available: in vitro images extracted from the web, and in situ images extracted from camcorder video collected inside a grocery store. As an additional contribution, we present the results of applying three commonly used object recognition detection algorithms (color histogram matching, SIFT matching, and boosted Haar-like features) to the dataset. Finally, we analyze the successes and failures of these algorithms against product type and imaging conditions, both in terms of recognition rate and localization accuracy, in order to suggest ways forward for further research in this domain. Human action recognition from videos is a challenging machine vision task with multiple important application domains, such as human-robot machine interaction, interactive entertainment, multimedia information retrieval, and surveillance. In this paper, we present a novel approach to human action recognition from 3D skeleton sequences extracted from depth data. We use the covariance matrix for skeleton joint locations over time as a discriminative descriptor for a sequence. To encode the relationship between joint movement and time, we deploy multiple covariance matrices over sub-sequences in a hierarchical fashion. The descriptor has a fixed length that is independent from the length of the described sequence. Our experiments show that using the covariance descriptor with an off-the-shelf classification algorithm outperforms the state of the art in action recognition on multiple datasets, captured either via a Kinect-type sensor or a sophisticated motion capture system. We also include an evaluation on a novel large dataset using our own annotation. In this paper, we present a new solution to the problem of matching groups of people across multiple non-overlapping cameras. Similar to the problem of matching individuals across cameras, matching groups of people also faces challenges such as variations of illumination conditions, poses and camera parameters. Moreover, people often swap their positions while walking in a group. In this paper, we propose to use covariance descriptor in appearance matching of group images. Covariance descriptor is shown to be a discriminative descriptor which captures both appearance and statistical properties of image regions. Furthermore, it presents a natural way of combining multiple heterogeneous features together with a relatively low dimensionality. Experimental results on two different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Action recognition is an important problem in computer vision and has received substantial attention in recent years. However, it remains very challenging due to the complex interaction of static and dynamic information, as well as the high computational cost of processing video data. This paper aims to apply the success of static image semantic recognition to the video domain, by leveraging both static and motion based descriptors in different stages of the semantic ladder. We examine the effects of three types of features: low-level dynamic descriptors, intermediate-level static deep architecture outputs, and static high-level semantics. In order to combine such heterogeneous sources of information, we employ a scalable method to fuse these features. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves action classification performance. We have obtained an accuracy of 89.59 and 62.88 on the well-known UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks, respectively, which compare favorably with the state-of-the-art. Abstract Action recognition (AR) is one of the most important tasks in video analysis and computer vision. Recently a large number of related methods have been proposed. While most of these methods are investigated on AR datasets collected from the visible spectrum, the AR problem under infrared scenarios still has not attracted much attention. There is even few public infrared datasets available for supporting the fundamental evaluation requirements of this research. To this issue, this work aims to emphasize the importance of the infrared AR problem in applications and arouse researchers' attention on this task. Specifically, we construct a new Inf rared A ction R ecognition ( InfAR ) dataset captured at different times, including in summer and winter, and explore how discriminable actions in our InfAR dataset are with the state-of-the-art pipelines based on low-level features and deep convolutional neural network (CNN), respectively. Our results reveal: (1) In all, dense trajectory feature can achieve the best performance while the appearance features, e.g., HOG, have relatively poorer performance; (2) the encoding method of vector of locally aggregated descriptors is evidently better than that of the widely-used Fisher Vector; (3) the late fusion facilitates a better performance than early fusion; (4) action videos captured in winter is more discriminable than in summer; (5) compared to appearance information, the motion information is more essential for infrared action recognition and utilizing this information through deep CNN can improve greatly the performance. The best performance achieved on our dataset is 76.66 (Average Precision), leaving a reasonable space for further exploring the insights underlying such type of infrared AR problem and accordingly designing proper techniques to further promote the performance on this specifically constructed InfAR dataset. In many surveillance systems there is a requirement todetermine whether a given person of interest has alreadybeen observed over a network of cameras. This is the personre-identification problem. The human appearance obtainedin one camera is usually different from the ones obtained inanother camera. In order to re-identify people the humansignature should handle difference in illumination, pose andcamera parameters. We propose a new appearance modelbased on spatial covariance regions extracted from humanbody parts. The new spatial pyramid scheme is applied tocapture the correlation between human body parts in orderto obtain a discriminative human signature. The humanbody parts are automatically detected using Histograms ofOriented Gradients (HOG). The method is evaluated usingbenchmark video sequences from i-LIDS Multiple-CameraTracking Scenario data set. The re-identification performanceis presented using the cumulative matching characteristic(CMC) curve. Finally, we show that the proposedapproach outperforms state of the art methods. Whereas the action recognition problem has become a hot topic within computer vision, the detection of fights or in general aggressive behavior has been comparatively less studied. Such capability may be extremely useful in some video surveillance scenarios like in prisons, psychiatric centers or even embedded in camera phones. Recent work has considered the well-known Bag-of-Words framework often used in generic action recognition for the specific problem of fight detection. Under this framework, spatio-temporal features are extracted from the video sequences and used for classification. Despite encouraging results in which near 90 accuracy rates were achieved for this specific task, the computational cost of extracting such features is prohibitive for practical applications, particularly in surveillance and media rating systems. The task of violence detection may have, however, specific features that can be leveraged. Inspired by psychology results that suggest that kinematic features alone are discriminant for specific actions, this work proposes a novel method which uses extreme acceleration patterns as the main feature. These extreme accelerations are efficiently estimated by applying the Radon transform to the power spectrum of consecutive frames. Experiments show that accuracy improvements of up to 12 are achieved with respect to state-of-the-art generic action recognition methods. Most importantly, the proposed method is at least 15 times faster. This manuscript introduces the problem of prominent object detection and recognition inspired by the fact that human seems to priorities perception of scene elements. The problem deals with finding the most important region of interest, segmenting the relevant item object in that area, and assigning it an object class label. In other words, we are solving the three problems of saliency modeling, saliency detection, and object recognition under one umbrella. The motivation behind such a problem formulation is (1) the benefits to the knowledge representation-based vision pipelines, and (2) the potential improvements in emulating bio-inspired vision systems by solving these three problems together. We are foreseeing extending this problem formulation to fully semantically segmented scenes with instance object priority for high-level inferences in various applications including assistive vision. Along with a new problem definition, we also propose a method to achieve such a task. The proposed model predicts the most important area in the image, segments the associated objects, and labels them. The proposed problem and method are evaluated against human fixations, annotated segmentation masks, and object class categories. We define a chance level for each of the evaluation criterion to compare the proposed algorithm with. Despite the good performance of the proposed baseline, the overall evaluations indicate that the problem of prominent object detection and recognition is a challenging task that is still worth investigating further. Representations that are invariant to translation, scale and other transformations, can considerably reduce the sample complexity of learning, allowing recognition of new object classes from very few examples|a hallmark of human recognition. Empirical estimates of one-dimensional projections of the distribution induced by a group of ane transformations are proven to represent a unique and invariant signature associated with an image. We show how projections yielding invariant signatures for future images can be learned automatically, and updated continuously, during unsupervised visual experience. A module performing ltering and pooling, like simple and complex cells as proposed by Hubel and Wiesel, can compute such estimates. Under this view, a pooling stage estimates a one-dimensional probability distribution. Invariance from observations through a restricted window is equivalent to a sparsity property w.r.t. to a transformation, which yields templates that are a) Gabor for optimal simultaneous invariance to translation and scale or b) very specic for complex, class-dependent transformations such as rotation in depth of faces. Hierarchical architectures consisting of this basic Hubel-Wiesel module inherit its properties of invariance, stability, and discriminability while capturing the compositional organization of the visual world in terms of wholes and parts, and are invariant to complex transformations that may only be locally ane. The theory applies to several existing deep learning convolutional architectures for image and speech recognition. It also suggests that the main computational goal of the ventral stream of visual cortex is to provide a hierarchical representation of new objects images which is invariant to transformations, stable, and discriminative for recognition|and that this representation may be continuously learned in an unsupervised way during development and natural visual experience. Though tremendous strides have been made in object recognition, one of the remaining open challenges is detecting small objects. We explore three aspects of the problem in the context of finding small faces: the role of scale invariance, image resolution, and contextual reasoning. While most recognition approaches aim to be scale-invariant, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall face are fundamentally different than those for recognizing a 300px tall face. We take a different approach and train separate detectors for different scales. To maintain efficiency, detectors are trained in a multi-task fashion: they make use of features extracted from multiple layers of single (deep) feature hierarchy. While training detectors for large objects is straightforward, the crucial challenge remains training detectors for small objects. We show that context is crucial, and define templates that make use of massively-large receptive fields (where 99 of the template extends beyond the object of interest). Finally, we explore the role of scale in pre-trained deep networks, providing ways to extrapolate networks tuned for limited scales to rather extreme ranges. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on massively-benchmarked face datasets (FDDB and WIDER FACE). In particular, when compared to prior art on WIDER FACE, our results reduce error by a factor of 2 (our models produce an AP of 82 while prior art ranges from 29-64 ). Though tremendous strides have been made in object recognition, one of the remaining open challenges is detecting small objects. We explore three aspects of the problem in the context of finding small faces: the role of scale invariance, image resolution, and contextual reasoning. While most recognition approaches aim to be scale-invariant, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall face are fundamentally different than those for recognizing a 300px tall face. We take a different approach and train separate detectors for different scales. To maintain efficiency, detectors are trained in a multi-task fashion: they make use of features extracted from multiple layers of single (deep) feature hierarchy. While training detectors for large objects is straightforward, the crucial challenge remains training detectors for small objects. We show that context is crucial, and define templates that make use of massively-large receptive fields (where 99 of the template extends beyond the object of interest). Finally, we explore the role of scale in pre-trained deep networks, providing ways to extrapolate networks tuned for limited scales to rather extreme ranges. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on massively-benchmarked face datasets (FDDB and WIDER FACE). In particular, when compared to prior art on WIDER FACE, our results reduce error by a factor of 2 (our models produce an AP of 82 while prior art ranges from 29-64 ). Local covariant feature detection, namely the problem of extracting viewpoint invariant features from images, has so far largely resisted the application of machine learning techniques. In this paper, we propose the first fully general formulation for learning local covariant feature detectors. We propose to cast detection as a regression problem, enabling the use of powerful regressors such as deep neural networks. We then derive a covariance constraint that can be used to automatically learn which visual structures provide stable anchors for local feature detection. We support these ideas theoretically, proposing a novel analysis of local features in term of geometric transformations, and we show that all common and many uncommon detectors can be derived in this framework. Finally, we present empirical results on translation and rotation covariant detectors on standard feature benchmarks, showing the power and flexibility of the framework. Local covariant feature detection, namely the problem of extracting viewpoint invariant features from images, has so far largely resisted the application of machine learning techniques. In this paper, we propose the first fully general formulation for learning local covariant feature detectors. We propose to cast detection as a regression problem, enabling the use of powerful regressors such as deep neural networks. We then derive a covariance constraint that can be used to automatically learn which visual structures provide stable anchors for local feature detection. We support these ideas theoretically, proposing a novel analysis of local features in term of geometric transformations, and we show that all common and many uncommon detectors can be derived in this framework. Finally, we present empirical results on translation and rotation covariant detectors on standard feature benchmarks, showing the power and flexibility of the framework. We consider the problem of detecting and localizing a human action from continuous action video from depth cameras. We believe that this problem is more challenging than the problem of traditional action recognition as we do not have the information about the starting and ending frames of an action class. Another challenge which makes the problem difficult, is the latency in detection of actions. In this paper, we introduce a greedy approach to detect the action class, invariant of their temporal scale in the testing sequences using class templates and basic skeleton based feature representation from the depth stream data generated using Microsoft Kinect. We evaluate the proposed method on the standard G3D and UTKinect-Action datasets consisting of five and ten actions, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs well for action detection and recognition under different temporal scales, and is able to outperform the state of the art methods at low latency. Due to importance of security in the society, monitoring activities and recognizing specific people through surveillance video camera is playing an important role. One of the main issues in such activity rises from the fact that cameras do not meet the resolution requirement for many face recognition algorithm. In order to solve this issue, in this paper we are proposing a new system which super resolve the image using sparse representation with the specific dictionary involving many natural and facial images followed by Hidden Markov Model and Support vector machine based face recognition. The proposed system has been tested on many well-known face databases such as FERET, HeadPose, and Essex University databases as well as our recently introduced iCV Face Recognition database (iFRD). The experimental results shows that the recognition rate is increasing considerably after apply the super resolution by using facial and natural image dictionary.