The deep two-stream architecture exhibited excellent performance on video based action recognition. The most computationally expensive step in this approach comes from the calculation of optical flow which prevents it to be real-time. This paper accelerates this architecture by replacing optical flow with motion vector which can be obtained directly from compressed videos without extra calculation. However, motion vector lacks fine structures, and contains noisy and inaccurate motion patterns, leading to the evident degradation of recognition performance. Our key insight for relieving this problem is that optical flow and motion vector are inherent correlated. Transferring the knowledge learned with optical flow CNN to motion vector CNN can significantly boost the performance of the latter. Specifically, we introduce three strategies for this, initialization transfer, supervision transfer and their combination. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable recognition performance to the state-of-the-art, while our method can process 390.7 frames per second, which is 27 times faster than the original two-stream method.
Action recognition has been widely studied in recent years. Early approaches extracted local spatio-time descriptors from input video and encoded these descriptors with Bag of Visual Words or its variants for classification. Laptev @cite_23 proposed spatio-time interest points by extending Harris corner into spatio-time dimension. Wang et al. @cite_29 further exploited trajectorires to model temporal relationship of continuous frames. Furthermore, Kviatkovsky et al. @cite_31 proposed a covariance descriptor to realize online action recognition. Popular local descriptors for video representation include HOG @cite_21 , HOF @cite_23 , MBH @cite_12 and TBC @cite_15 . And feature encoding techniques include hard quantization @cite_26 , VLAD @cite_11 , and Fisher Vector @cite_13 . @cite_7 @cite_0 @cite_16 exploited mid-level representations by proposing MoFAP and Motionlets.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_15 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_12 @cite_11
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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. 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. 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 We propose a new action and gesture recognition method based on spatio-temporal covariance descriptors and a weighted Riemannian locality preserving projection approach that takes into account the curved space formed by the descriptors. The weighted projection is then exploited during boosting to create a final multiclass classification algorithm that employs the most useful spatio-temporal regions. We also show how the descriptors can be computed quickly through the use of integral video representations. Experiments on the UCF sport, CK+ facial expression and Cambridge hand gesture datasets indicate superior performance of the proposed method compared to several recent state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed method is robust and does not require additional processing of the videos, such as foreground detection, interest-point detection or tracking. This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6 mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding. A descriptor for describing action in terms of shape and motion is proposed.The descriptor is employed in the online action recognition scenario.Two runtime optimizations are introduced to enable applicability in real time.The method is simple, fast and accurate enough to be of practical value. We propose a novel approach for online action recognition. The action is represented in a low dimensional (15D) space using a covariance descriptor of shape and motion features - spatio-temporal coordinates and optical flow of pixels belonging to extracted silhouettes. We analyze the applicability of the descriptor for online scenarios where action classification is performed based on incomplete spatio-temporal volumes. In order to enable our online action classification algorithm to be applied in real time, we introduce two modifications, namely the incremental covariance update and the on demand nearest neighbor classification. In our experiments we use quality measures, such as latency, especially designed for the online scenario to report the algorithm's performance. We evaluate the performance of our descriptor on standard, publicly available datasets for gesture recognition, namely the Cambridge-Gestures dataset and the ChaLearn One-Shot-Learning dataset and show that its performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art despite its relative simplicity. The evaluation on the UCF-101 action recognition dataset demonstrates that the descriptor is applicable in challenging unconstrained environments. 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 This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 437 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.59M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.8 mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding. 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. The goal of this paper is to build robust human action recognition for real world surveillance videos. Local spatio-temporal features around interest points provide compact but descriptive representations for video analysis and motion recognition. Current approaches tend to extend spatial descriptions by adding a temporal component for the appearance descriptor, which only implicitly captures motion information. We propose an algorithm called MoSIFT, which detects interest points and encodes not only their local appearance but also explicitly models local motion. The idea is to detect distinctive local features through local appearance and motion. We construct MoSIFT feature descriptors in the spirit of the well-known SIFT descriptors to be robust to small deformations through grid aggregation. We also introduce a bigram model to construct a correlation between local features to capture the more global structure of actions. The method advances the state of the art result on the KTH dataset to an accuracy of 95.8 . We also applied our approach to 100 hours of surveillance data as part of the TRECVID Event Detection task with very promising results on recognizing human actions in the real world surveillance videos. 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. We describe a mid-level approach for action recognition. From an input video, we extract salient spatio-temporal structures by forming clusters of trajectories that serve as candidates for the parts of an action. The assembly of these clusters into an action class is governed by a graphical model that incorporates appearance and motion constraints for the individual parts and pairwise constraints for the spatio-temporal dependencies among them. During training, we estimate the model parameters discriminatively. During classification, we efficiently match the model to a video using discrete optimization. We validate the model's classification ability in standard benchmark datasets and illustrate its potential to support a fine-grained analysis that not only gives a label to a video, but also identifies and localizes its constituent parts. Spatio-temporal representations in frame sequences play an important role in the task of action recognition. Previously, a method of using optical flow as a temporal information in combination with a set of RGB images that contain spatial information has shown great performance enhancement in the action recognition tasks. However, it has an expensive computational cost and requires two-stream (RGB and optical flow) framework. In this paper, we propose MFNet (Motion Feature Network) containing motion blocks which make it possible to encode spatio-temporal information between adjacent frames in a unified network that can be trained end-to-end. The motion block can be attached to any existing CNN-based action recognition frameworks with only a small additional cost. We evaluated our network on two of the action recognition datasets (Jester and Something-Something) and achieved competitive performances for both datasets by training the networks from scratch. This paper addresses action spotting, the spatiotemporal detection and localization of human actions in video. A novel compact local descriptor of video dynamics in the context of action spotting is introduced based on visual spacetime oriented energy measurements. This descriptor is efficiently computed directly from raw image intensity data and thereby forgoes the problems typically associated with flow-based features. An important aspect of the descriptor is that it allows for the comparison of the underlying dynamics of two spacetime video segments irrespective of spatial appearance, such as differences induced by clothing, and with robustness to clutter. An associated similarity measure is introduced that admits efficient exhaustive search for an action template across candidate video sequences. Empirical evaluation of the approach on a set of challenging natural videos suggests its efficacy. Human action recognition from realistic videos plays a key role in multimedia event detection and understanding. In this paper, a novel Trajectory Based Covariance (TBC) descriptor is proposed, which is formulated along the dense trajectories. To map the descriptor matrix to vector space and trim out the redundancy of data, the TBC descriptor matrix is projected to Euclidean space by the Logarithm Principal Components Analysis (LogPCA). Our method is tested on the challenging Hollywood2 and TV Human Interaction datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed TBC descriptor outperforms three baseline descriptors (i.e., histogram of oriented gradient, histogram of optical flow and motion boundary histogram), and our method achieves better recognition performances than a number of state-of-the-art approaches. 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. 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. 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. 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. We present a novel action recognition method based on space-time locally adaptive regression kernels and the matrix cosine similarity measure. The proposed method uses a single example of an action as a query to find similar matches. It does not require prior knowledge about actions, foreground background segmentation, or any motion estimation or tracking. Our method is based on the computation of novel space-time descriptors from the query video which measure the likeness of a voxel to its surroundings. Salient features are extracted from said descriptors and compared against analogous features from the target video. This comparison is done using a matrix generalization of the cosine similarity measure. The algorithm yields a scalar resemblance volume, with each voxel indicating the likelihood of similarity between the query video and all cubes in the target video. Using nonparametric significance tests by controlling the false discovery rate, we detect the presence and location of actions similar to the query video. High performance is demonstrated on challenging sets of action data containing fast motions, varied contexts, and complicated background. Further experiments on the Weizmann and KTH data sets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in action categorization.