Many visual recognition problems can be approached by counting instances. To determine whether an event is present in a long internet video, one could count how many frames seem to contain the activity. Classifying the activity of a group of people can be done by counting the actions of individual people. Encoding these cardinality relationships can reduce sensitivity to clutter, in the form of irrelevant frames or individuals not involved in a group activity. Learned parameters can encode how many instances tend to occur in a class of interest. To this end, this paper develops a powerful and flexible framework to infer any cardinality relation between latent labels in a multi-instance model. Hard or soft cardinality relations can be encoded to tackle diverse levels of ambiguity. Experiments on tasks such as human activity recognition, video event detection, and video summarization demonstrate the effectiveness of using cardinality relations for improving recognition results.
This paper presents a novel model for cardinality relations in visual recognition, in particular for the analysis of video sequences. Existing video analysis methods generally focus on structured spatio-temporal models, complementary to our proposed approach. For instance, pioneering work was done by @cite_6 in analyzing structured videos by creating storyline'' models populated from AND-OR graph representations. Related models have proven effective at analyzing scenes of human activity more broadly in work by @cite_2 . A series of recent papers has focused on the problem of group activity recognition, inferring an activity that is performed by a set of people in a scene. @cite_40 @cite_23 , @cite_34 , and @cite_0 devised models for spatial and temporal relations between the individuals involved in a putative interaction. @cite_36 consider contextual relations between humans and objects in a scene to detect interactions of interest. The structural relations exploited by these methods are a key component of activity understanding, but present different information from the cardinality relations we study.
@cite_36 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_34
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We propose a novel approach to understanding activities from their partial observations monitored through multiple non-overlapping cameras separated by unknown time gaps. In our approach, each camera view is first decomposed automatically into regions based on the correlation of object dynamics across different spatial locations in all camera views. A new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is then formulated to discover and quantify the time delayed correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views in a single common reference space. We show that learning the time delayed activity correlations offers important contextual information for (i) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network; (ii) robust person re-identification and (iii) global activity interpretation and video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, our approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it thus can be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featured with severe inter-object occlusions. The effectiveness and robustness of our approach are demonstrated through experiments on 330 hours of videos captured from 17 cameras installed at two busy underground stations with complex and diverse scenes. Complex human activities occurring in videos can be defined in terms of temporal configurations of primitive actions. Prior work typically hand-picks the primitives, their total number, and temporal relations (e.g., allow only followed-by), and then only estimates their relative significance for activity recognition. We advance prior work by learning what activity parts and their spatiotemporal relations should be captured to represent the activity, and how relevant they are for enabling efficient inference in realistic videos. We represent videos by spatiotemporal graphs, where nodes correspond to multiscale video segments, and edges capture their hierarchical, temporal, and spatial relationships. Access to video segments is provided by our new, multiscale segmenter. Given a set of training spatiotemporal graphs, we learn their archetype graph, and pdf's associated with model nodes and edges. The model adaptively learns from data relevant video segments and their relations, addressing the “what” and “how.” Inference and learning are formulated within the same framework - that of a robust, least-squares optimization - which is invariant to arbitrary permutations of nodes in spatiotemporal graphs. The model is used for parsing new videos in terms of detecting and localizing relevant activity parts. We out-perform the state of the art on benchmark Olympic and UT human-interaction datasets, under a favorable complexity-vs.-accuracy trade-off. 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 Human activity recognition is a challenging task, especially when its background is unknown or changing, and when scale or illumination differs in each video. Approaches utilizing spatio-temporal local features have proved that they are able to cope with such difficulties, but they mainly focused on classifying short videos of simple periodic actions. In this paper, we present a new activity recognition methodology that overcomes the limitations of the previous approaches using local features. We introduce a novel matching, spatio-temporal relationship match, which is designed to measure structural similarity between sets of features extracted from two videos. Our match hierarchically considers spatio-temporal relationships among feature points, thereby enabling detection and localization of complex non-periodic activities. In contrast to previous approaches to ‘classify’ videos, our approach is designed to ‘detect and localize’ all occurring activities from continuous videos where multiple actors and pedestrians are present. We implement and test our methodology on a newly-introduced dataset containing videos of multiple interacting persons and individual pedestrians. The results confirm that our system is able to recognize complex non-periodic activities (e.g. ‘push’ and ‘hug’) from sets of spatio-temporal features even when multiple activities are present in the scene