The recent trend in action recognition is towards larger datasets, an increasing number of action classes and larger visual vocabularies. State-of-the-art human action classification in challenging video data is currently based on a bag-of-visual-words pipeline in which space-time features are aggregated globally to form a histogram. The strategies chosen to sample features and construct a visual vocabulary are critical to performance, in fact often dominating performance. In this work we provide a critical evaluation of various approaches to building a vocabulary and show that good practises do have a significant impact. By subsampling and partitioning features strategically, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on 5 major action recognition datasets using relatively small visual vocabularies.
bof per category The selection of good partitioning clusters to form a visual vocabulary is also important, as they form the basic units of the histogram representation on which a classifier will base its decision @cite_12 . Thus, for a categorisation task, having clusters which represent feature patches that distinguish the classes is most likely to make classification easier. This motivates per-category clustering, to preserve discriminative information that may be lost by a universal vocabulary @cite_12 , especially when distinct categories are very similar. The downside is that learning a separate visual vocabulary per class may also generate many redundant clusters when features are shared amongst multiple categories. On the other hand, since the complexity of building visual vocabularies depends on the number of cluster centres @math , clustering features independently allows to reduce @math whilst keeping the representation dimensionality high, and makes the vocabulary learning easily parallelisable. So far, per-category training has seen promise on a single dataset with a small number of classes @cite_12 ; it is therefore to be seen how it performs on challenging action classification data with a large number of action classes.
@cite_12
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We present a novel method for constructing a visual vocabulary that takes into account the class labels of images, thus resulting in better recognition performance and more efficient learning. Our method consists of two stages: Cluster Precision Maximisation (CPM) and Adaptive Refinement. In the first stage, a Reciprocal Nearest Neighbours (RNN) clustering algorithm is guided towards class representative visual words by maximising a new cluster precision criterion. As we are able to optimise the vocabulary without the need for expensive cross-validation, the overall training time is significantly reduced without a negative impact on the results. Next, an adaptive threshold refinement scheme is proposed with the aim of increasing vocabulary compactness while at the same time improving the recognition rate and further increasing the representativeness of the visual words for category-level object recognition. This is a correlation clustering based approach, which works as a meta-clustering and optimises the cut-off threshold for each cluster separately. In the experiments we analyse the recognition rate of different vocabularies for a subset of the Caltech 101 dataset, showing how RNN in combination with CPM selects the optimal codebooks, and how the clustering refinement step succeeds in further increasing the recognition rate. Bag of features (BoF) representation has attracted an increasing amount of attention in large scale image processing systems. BoF representation treats images as loose collections of local invariant descriptors extracted from them. The visual codebook is generally constructed by using an unsupervised algorithm such as K-means to quantize the local descriptors into clusters. Images are then represented by the frequency histograms of the codewords contained in them. To build a compact and discriminative codebook, codeword selection has become an indispensable tool. However, most of the existing codeword selection algorithms are supervised and the human labeling may be very expensive. In this paper, we consider the problem of unsupervised codeword selection, and propose a novel algorithm called Discriminative Codeword Selection (DCS). Motivated from recent studies on discriminative clustering, the central idea of our proposed algorithm is to select those codewords so that the cluster structure of the image database can be best respected. Specifically, a multi-output linear function is fitted to model the relationship between the data matrix after codeword selection and the indicator matrix. The most discriminative codewords are thus defined as those leading to minimal fitting error. Experiments on image retrieval and clustering have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is to categorize objects into subordinate classes instead of basic classes. One major challenge in FGVC is the co-occurrence of two issues: 1) many subordinate classes are highly correlated and are difficult to distinguish, and 2) there exists the large intra-class variation (e.g., due to object pose). This paper proposes to explicitly address the above two issues via distance metric learning (DML). DML addresses the first issue by learning an embedding so that data points from the same class will be pulled together while those from different classes should be pushed apart from each other; and it addresses the second issue by allowing the flexibility that only a portion of the neighbors (not all data points) from the same class need to be pulled together. However, feature representation of an image is often high dimensional, and DML is known to have difficulty in dealing with high dimensional feature vectors since it would require @math for storage and @math for optimization. To this end, we proposed a multi-stage metric learning framework that divides the large-scale high dimensional learning problem to a series of simple subproblems, achieving @math computational complexity. The empirical study with FVGC benchmark datasets verifies that our method is both effective and efficient compared to the state-of-the-art FGVC approaches. Bag-of-features (BoF) deriving from local keypoints has recently appeared promising for object and scene classification. Whether BoF can naturally survive the challenges such as reliability and scalability of visual classification, nevertheless, remains uncertain due to various implementation choices. In this paper, we evaluate various factors which govern the performance of BoF. The factors include the choices of detector, kernel, vocabulary size and weighting scheme. We offer some practical insights in how to optimize the performance by choosing good keypoint detector and kernel. For the weighting scheme, we propose a novel soft-weighting method to assess the significance of a visual word to an image. We experimentally show that the proposed soft-weighting scheme can consistently offer better performance than other popular weighting methods. On both PASCAL-2005 and TRECVID-2006 datasets, our BoF setting generates competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. We also show that the BoF is highly complementary to global features. By incorporating the BoF with color and texture features, an improvement of 50 is reported on TRECVID-2006 dataset.