Image and video classification research has made great progress through the development of handcrafted local features and learning based features. These two architectures were proposed roughly at the same time and have flourished at overlapping stages of history. However, they are typically viewed as distinct approaches. In this paper, we emphasize their structural similarities and show how such a unified view helps us in designing features that balance efficiency and effectiveness. As an example, we study the problem of designing efficient video feature learning algorithms for action recognition. We approach this problem by first showing that local handcrafted features and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) share the same convolution-pooling network structure. We then propose a two-stream Convolutional ISA (ConvISA) that adopts the convolution-pooling structure of the state-of-the-art handcrafted video feature with greater modeling capacities and a cost-effective training algorithm. Through custom designed network structures for pixels and optical flow, our method also reflects distinctive characteristics of these two data sources. Our experimental results on standard action recognition benchmarks show that by focusing on the structure of CNNs, rather than end-to-end training methods, we are able to design an efficient and powerful video feature learning algorithm.
There have been many works attempting to improve IDT due to its popularity. @cite_22 enhanced the performance of IDT by increasing codebook sizes and fusing multiple coding methods. @cite_15 explored ways to sub-sample and generate vocabularies for DT features. @cite_18 achieved state-of-the-art performance on several action recognition datasets through applying three techniques including data augmentation, modeling score distribution over video subsequences, and capturing the relationship among action classes. @cite_10 modeled the evolution of appearance in the video and achieved state-of-the-art results on the Hollywood2 dataset. @cite_6 proposed to extract features from videos with multiple playback speeds to achieve speed invariances. However, none of them dealt with the fact that IDT relies on very simple handcrafted descriptors. In contrast, data-driven approaches have demonstrated their modeling power over image recognition ( @cite_0 ) and are gradually replacing traditional handcrafted methods.
@cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_15 @cite_10
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Motivated by the success of data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in object recognition on static images, researchers are working hard towards developing CNN equivalents for learning video features. However, learning video features globally has proven to be quite a challenge due to its high dimensionality, the lack of labelled data and the difficulty in processing large-scale video data. Therefore, we propose to leverage effective techniques from both data-driven and data-independent approaches to improve action recognition system. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a two-stream Stacked Convolutional Independent Subspace Analysis (ConvISA) architecture to show that unsupervised learning methods can significantly boost the performance of traditional local features extracted from data-independent models. Second, we demonstrate that by learning on video volumes detected by Improved Dense Trajectory (IDT), we can seamlessly combine our novel local descriptors with hand-crafted descriptors. Thus we can utilize available feature enhancing techniques developed for hand-crafted descriptors. Finally, similar to multi-class classification framework in CNNs, we propose a training-free re-ranking technique that exploits the relationship among action classes to improve the overall performance. Our experimental results on four benchmark action recognition datasets show significantly improved performance. A Comprehensive study on the BoVW pipeline for action recognition task.An evaluation and a generic analysis on 13 encoding methods.Intra-normalization for supervector based encoding methods.An evaluation on three fusion methods.Several good practices of the BoVW pipeline for action recognition task. Video based action recognition is one of the important and challenging problems in computer vision research. Bag of visual words model (BoVW) with local features has been very popular for a long time and obtained the state-of-the-art performance on several realistic datasets, such as the HMDB51, UCF50, and UCF101. BoVW is a general pipeline to construct a global representation from local features, which is mainly composed of five steps; (i) feature extraction, (ii) feature pre-processing, (iii) codebook generation, (iv) feature encoding, and (v) pooling and normalization. Although many efforts have been made in each step independently in different scenarios, their effects on action recognition are still unknown. Meanwhile, video data exhibits different views of visual patterns , such as static appearance and motion dynamics. Multiple descriptors are usually extracted to represent these different views. Fusing these descriptors is crucial for boosting the final performance of an action recognition system. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive study of all steps in BoVW and different fusion methods, and uncover some good practices to produce a state-of-the-art action recognition system. Specifically, we explore two kinds of local features, ten kinds of encoding methods, eight kinds of pooling and normalization strategies, and three kinds of fusion methods. We conclude that every step is crucial for contributing to the final recognition rate and improper choice in one of the steps may counteract the performance improvement of other steps. Furthermore, based on our comprehensive study, we propose a simple yet effective representation, called hybrid supervector, by exploring the complementarity of different BoVW frameworks with improved dense trajectories. Using this representation, we obtain impressive results on the three challenging datasets; HMDB51 (61.9 ), UCF50 (92.3 ), and UCF101 (87.9 ). 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. 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