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.
Analogous approaches have been studied for unconstrained'' internet video analysis. Methods to capture the temporal structure of high-level events need to be robust to the presence of irrelevant frames. Successful models include @cite_29 and @cite_35 , who extend latent variable models in the temporal domain. @cite_10 develop hidden Markov models with variable duration states to account for the temporal length of action segments. @cite_5 compose a test video with a set of kernel matches to training videos. @cite_24 effectively combine informative subsets of features extracted from videos to improve event detection. @cite_4 label videos with sequences of low-level actions. Pirsiavash and Ramanan @cite_32 develop stochastic grammars for understanding structured events. @cite_22 propose a feature fusion method based on utilizing related exemplars for event detection. @cite_26 apply multiple instance learning to video event detection by representing a video as multi-granular temporal video segments. Our work is similar in spirit, but contributes richer cardinality relations and more powerful kernel representations; empirically we show these can deliver superior performance.
@cite_35 @cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_5 @cite_10
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Video event detection allows intelligent indexing of video content based on events. Traditional approaches extract features from video frames or shots, then quantize and pool the features to form a single vector representation for the entire video. Though simple and efficient, the final pooling step may lead to loss of temporally local information, which is important in indicating which part in a long video signifies presence of the event. In this work, we propose a novel instance-based video event detection approach. We represent each video as multiple 'instances', defined as video segments of different temporal intervals. The objective is to learn an instance-level event detection model based on only video-level labels. To solve this problem, we propose a large-margin formulation which treats the instance labels as hidden latent variables, and simultaneously infers the instance labels as well as the instance-level classification model. Our framework infers optimal solutions that assume positive videos have a large number of positive instances while negative videos have the fewest ones. Extensive experiments on large-scale video event datasets demonstrate significant performance gains. The proposed method is also useful in explaining the detection results by localizing the temporal segments in a video which is responsible for the positive detection. We present a compositional model for video event detection. A video is modeled using a collection of both global and segment-level features and kernel functions are employed for similarity comparisons. The locations of salient, discriminative video segments are treated as a latent variable, allowing the model to explicitly ignore portions of the video that are unimportant for classification. A novel, multiple kernel learning (MKL) latent support vector machine (SVM) is defined, that is used to combine and re-weight multiple feature types in a principled fashion while simultaneously operating within the latent variable framework. The compositional nature of the proposed model allows it to respond directly to the challenges of temporal clutter and intra-class variation, which are prevalent in unconstrained internet videos. Experimental results on the TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection 2011 (MED11) dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the method. The problem of adaptively selecting pooling regions for the classification of complex video events is considered. Complex events are defined as events composed of several characteristic behaviors, whose temporal configuration can change from sequence to sequence. A dynamic pooling operator is defined so as to enable a unified solution to the problems of event specific video segmentation, temporal structure modeling, and event detection. Video is decomposed into segments, and the segments most informative for detecting a given event are identified, so as to dynamically determine the pooling operator most suited for each sequence. This dynamic pooling is implemented by treating the locations of characteristic segments as hidden information, which is inferred, on a sequence-by-sequence basis, via a large-margin classification rule with latent variables. Although the feasible set of segment selections is combinatorial, it is shown that a globally optimal solution to the inference problem can be obtained efficiently, through the solution of a series of linear programs. Besides the coarse-level location of segments, a finer model of video structure is implemented by jointly pooling features of segment-tuples. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the resulting event detector has state-of-the-art performance on challenging video datasets. In this paper, we tackle the problem of understanding the temporal structure of complex events in highly varying videos obtained from the Internet. Towards this goal, we utilize a conditional model trained in a max-margin framework that is able to automatically discover discriminative and interesting segments of video, while simultaneously achieving competitive accuracies on difficult detection and recognition tasks. We introduce latent variables over the frames of a video, and allow our algorithm to discover and assign sequences of states that are most discriminative for the event. Our model is based on the variable-duration hidden Markov model, and models durations of states in addition to the transitions between states. The simplicity of our model allows us to perform fast, exact inference using dynamic programming, which is extremely important when we set our sights on being able to process a very large number of videos quickly and efficiently. We show promising results on the Olympic Sports dataset [16] and the 2011 TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection task [18]. We also illustrate and visualize the semantic understanding capabilities of our model. Automatic facial action unit (AU) detection from video is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Two main approaches have been pursued: (1) static modeling — typically posed as a discriminative classification problem in which each video frame is evaluated independently; (2) temporal modeling — frames are segmented into sequences and typically modeled with a variant of dynamic Bayesian networks. We propose a segment-based approach, kSeg-SVM, that incorporates benefits of both approaches and avoids their limitations. kSeg-SVM is a temporal extension of the spatial bag-of-words. kSeg-SVM is trained within a structured output SVM framework that formulates AU detection as a problem of detecting temporal events in a time series of visual features. Each segment is modeled by a variant of the BoW representation with soft assignment of the words based on similarity. Our framework has several benefits for AU detection: (1) both dependencies between features and the length of action units are modeled; (2) all possible segments of the video may be used for training; and (3) no assumptions are required about the underlying structure of the action unit events (e.g., i.i.d.). Our algorithm finds the best k-or-fewer segments that maximize the SVM score. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art static methods for AU detection. The representation and recognition of complex semantic events (e.g. illegal parking, stealing objects) is a challenging task for high-level understanding of video sequence. To solve this problem, an attribute graph grammar for events modeling is studied in this paper. This grammar models the variability of semantic events by a set of meaningful ''event components'' with the spatio-temporal constraints. The event components are defined manually according to their semantic meaning, and further decomposed into atomic event primitives. These event primitives are learned on a object-trajectory table that describes mobile object attributes (location, velocity, and visibility) in a video sequence. A dictionary of temporal and spatial relations are defined to constrain the event primitives. With this representation, one observed event can be parsed into an ''event parse graph'', and all possible variability of one event can be modeled into an ''event And-Or graph'', in a syntactic way. The probability model of an ''event And-Or graph'' can be learned on a set of annotated event instances, and given a learned event And-Or graph, a Gibbs sampling scheme is utilized for inference on a testing video. In the experiments, we test events recognition performance of the proposed on both real indoor and outdoor videos and show quantitative recognition rate on the public LHI dataset. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. In this paper, we model multi-agent events in terms of a temporally varying sequence of sub-events, and propose a novel approach for learning, detecting and representing events in videos. The proposed approach has three main steps. First, in order to learn the event structure from training videos, we automatically encode the sub-event dependency graph, which is the learnt event model that depicts the conditional dependency between sub-events. Second, we pose the problem of event detection in novel videos as clustering the maximally correlated sub-events using normalized cuts. The principal assumption made in this work is that the events are composed of a highly correlated chain of sub-events that have high weights (association) within the cluster and relatively low weights (disassociation) between the clusters. The event detection does not require prior knowledge of the number of agents involved in an event and does not make any assumptions about the length of an event. Third, we recognize the fact that any abstract event model should extend to representations related to human understanding of events. Therefore, we propose an extension of CASE representation of natural languages that allows a plausible means of interface between users and the computer. We show results of learning, detection, and representation of events for videos in the meeting, surveillance, and railroad monitoring domains. In this paper, we present an event parsing algorithm based on Stochastic Context Sensitive Grammar (SCSG) for understanding events, inferring the goal of agents, and predicting their plausible intended actions. The SCSG represents the hierarchical compositions of events and the temporal relations between the sub-events. The alphabets of the SCSG are atomic actions which are defined by the poses of agents and their interactions with objects in the scene. The temporal relations are used to distinguish events with similar structures, interpolate missing portions of events, and are learned from the training data. In comparison with existing methods, our paper makes the following contributions. i) We define atomic actions by a set of relations based on the fluents of agents and their interactions with objects in the scene. ii) Our algorithm handles events insertion and multi-agent events, keeps all possible interpretations of the video to preserve the ambiguities, and achieves the globally optimal parsing solution in a Bayesian framework; iii) The algorithm infers the goal of the agents and predicts their intents by a top-down process; iv) The algorithm improves the detection of atomic actions by event contexts. We show satisfactory results of event recognition and atomic action detection on the data set we captured which contains 12 event categories in both indoor and outdoor videos. Real-world videos of human activities exhibit temporal structure at various scales, long videos are typically composed out of multiple action instances, where each instance is itself composed of sub-actions with variable durations and orderings. Temporal grammars can presumably model such hierarchical structure, but are computationally difficult to apply for long video streams. We describe simple grammars that capture hierarchical temporal structure while admitting inference with a finite-state-machine. This makes parsing linear time, constant storage, and naturally online. We train grammar parameters using a latent structural SVM, where latent subactions are learned automatically. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach over common baselines on a new half-million frame dataset of continuous YouTube videos. For the problem of action detection, most existing methods require that relevant portions of the action of interest in training videos have been manually annotated with bounding boxes. Some recent works tried to avoid tedious manual annotation , and proposed to automatically identify the relevant portions in training videos. However, these methods only concerned the identification in either spatial or temporal domain, and may get irrelevant contents from another domain. These irrelevant contents are usually undesirable in the training phase, which will lead to a degradation of the detection performance. This paper advances prior work by proposing a joint learning framework to simultaneously identify the spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest in training videos. To get pixel-level localization results, our method uses dense trajectories extracted from videos as local features to represent actions. We first present a trajectory split-and-merge algorithm to segment a video into the background and several separated foreground moving objects. In this algorithm, the inherent temporal smoothness of human actions is exploited to facilitate segmentation. Then, with the latent SVM framework on segmentation results, spatial and temporal extents of the action of interest are treated as latent variables that are inferred simultaneously with action recognition. Experiments on two challenging datasets show that action detection with our learned spatial and temporal extents is superior than state-of-the-art methods. In this paper we address the challenging problem of complex event recognition by using low-level events. In this problem, each complex event is captured by a long video in which several low-level events happen. The dataset contains several videos and due to the large number of videos and complexity of the events, the available annotation for the low-level events is very noisy which makes the detection task even more challenging. To tackle these problems we model the joint relationship between the low-level events in a graph where we consider a node for each low-level event and whenever there is a correlation between two low-level events the graph has an edge between the corresponding nodes. In addition, for decreasing the effect of weak and or irrelevant low-level event detectors we consider the presence absence of low-level events as hidden variables and learn a discriminative model by using latent SVM formulation. Using our learned model for the complex event recognition, we can also apply it for improving the detection of the low-level events in video clips which enables us to discover a conceptual description of the video. Thus our model can do complex event recognition and explain a video in terms of low-level events in a single framework. We have evaluated our proposed method over the most challenging multimedia event detection dataset. The experimental results reveals that the proposed method performs well compared to the baseline method. Further, our results of conceptual description of video shows that our model is learned quite well to handle the noisy annotation and surpass the low-level event detectors which are directly trained on the raw features. Complex events consist of various human interactions with different objects in diverse environments. The evidences needed to recognize events may occur in short time periods with variable lengths and can happen anywhere in a video. This fact prevents conventional machine learning algorithms from effectively recognizing the events. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can automatically identify the key evidences in videos for detecting complex events. Both static instances (objects) and dynamic instances (actions) are considered by sampling frames and temporal segments respectively. To compare the characteristic power of heterogeneous instances, we embed static and dynamic instances into a multiple instance learning framework via instance similarity measures, and cast the problem as an Evidence Selective Ranking (ESR) process. We impose l1 norm to select key evidences while using the Infinite Push Loss Function to enforce positive videos to have higher detection scores than negative videos. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. Experiments on large-scale video datasets show that our method can improve the detection accuracy while providing the unique capability in discovering key evidences of each complex event. We present a system for multimedia event detection. The developed system characterizes complex multimedia events based on a large array of multimodal features, and classifies unseen videos by effectively fusing diverse responses. We present three major technical innovations. First, we explore novel visual and audio features across multiple semantic granularities, including building, often in an unsupervised manner, mid-level and high-level features upon low-level features to enable semantic understanding. Second, we show a novel Latent SVM model which learns and localizes discriminative high-level concepts in cluttered video sequences. In addition to improving detection accuracy beyond existing approaches, it enables a unique summary for every retrieval by its use of high-level concepts and temporal evidence localization. The resulting summary provides some transparency into why the system classified the video as it did. Finally, we present novel fusion learning algorithms and our methodology to improve fusion learning under limited training data condition. Thorough evaluation on a large TRECVID MED 2011 dataset showcases the benefits of the presented system. First-person videos have unique characteristics such as heavy egocentric motion, strong preceding events, salient transitional activities and post-event impacts. Action recognition methods designed for third person videos may not optimally represent actions captured by first-person videos. We propose a method to represent the high level dynamics of sub-events in first-person videos by dynamically pooling features of sub-intervals of time series using a temporal feature pooling function. The sub-event dynamics are then temporally aligned to make a new series. To keep track of how the sub-event dynamics evolve over time, we recursively employ the Fast Fourier Transform on a pyramidal temporal structure. The Fourier coefficients of the segment define the overall video representation. We perform experiments on two existing benchmark first-person video datasets which have been captured in a controlled environment. Addressing this gap, we introduce a new dataset collected from YouTube which has a larger number of classes and a greater diversity of capture conditions thereby more closely depicting real-world challenges in first-person video analysis. We compare our method to state-of-the-art first person and generic video recognition algorithms. Our method consistently outperforms the nearest competitors by 10.3 , 3.3 and 11.7 respectively on the three datasets. In this paper, we focus on complex event detection in internet videos while also providing the key evidences of the detection results. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved promising performance in image classification and action recognition tasks. However, it remains an open problem how to use CNNs for video event detection and recounting, mainly due to the complexity and diversity of video events. In this work, we propose a flexible deep CNN infrastructure, namely Deep Event Network (DevNet), that simultaneously detects pre-defined events and provides key spatial-temporal evidences. Taking key frames of videos as input, we first detect the event of interest at the video level by aggregating the CNN features of the key frames. The pieces of evidences which recount the detection results, are also automatically localized, both temporally and spatially. The challenge is that we only have video level labels, while the key evidences usually take place at the frame levels. Based on the intrinsic property of CNNs, we first generate a spatial-temporal saliency map by back passing through DevNet, which then can be used to find the key frames which are most indicative to the event, as well as to localize the specific spatial position, usually an object, in the frame of the highly indicative area. Experiments on the large scale TRECVID 2014 MEDTest dataset demonstrate the promising performance of our method, both for event detection and evidence recounting. Real-world actions occur often in crowded, dynamic environments. This poses a difficult challenge for current approaches to video event detection because it is difficult to segment the actor from the background due to distracting motion from other objects in the scene. We propose a technique for event recognition in crowded videos that reliably identifies actions in the presence of partial occlusion and background clutter. Our approach is based on three key ideas: (1) we efficiently match the volumetric representation of an event against oversegmented spatio-temporal video volumes; (2) we augment our shape-based features using flow; (3) rather than treating an event template as an atomic entity, we separately match by parts (both in space and time), enabling robustness against occlusions and actor variability. Our experiments on human actions, such as picking up a dropped object or waving in a crowd show reliable detection with few false positives. Video analysis is an important branch of computer vision due to its wide applications, ranging from video surveillance, video indexing, and retrieval to human computer interaction. All of the applications are based on a good video representation, which encodes video content into a feature vector with fixed length. Most existing methods treat video as a flat image sequence, but from our observations we argue that video is an information-intensive media with intrinsic hierarchical structure, which is largely ignored by previous approaches. Therefore, in this work, we represent the hierarchical structure of video with multiple granularities including, from short to long, single frame, consecutive frames (motion), short clip, and the entire video. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep learning framework to model each granularity individually. Specifically, we model the frame and motion granularities with 2D convolutional neural networks and model the clip and video granularities with 3D convolutional neural networks. Long Short-Term Memory networks are applied on the frame, motion, and clip to further exploit the long-term temporal clues. Consequently, the whole framework utilizes multi-stream CNNs to learn a hierarchical representation that captures spatial and temporal information of video. To validate its effectiveness in video analysis, we apply this video representation to action recognition task. We adopt a distribution-based fusion strategy to combine the decision scores from all the granularities, which are obtained by using a softmax layer on the top of each stream. We conduct extensive experiments on three action benchmarks (UCF101, HMDB51, and CCV) and achieve competitive performance against several state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting highlights in sports videos. The videos are temporally decomposed into a series of events based on an unsupervised event discovery and detection framework. The framework solely depends on easy-to-extract low-level visual features such as color histogram (CH) or histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), which can potentially be generalized to different sports. The unigram and bigram statistics of the detected events are then used to provide a compact representation of the video. The effectiveness of the proposed representation is demonstrated on cricket video classification: Highlight vs. Non-Highlight for individual video clips (7000 training and 7000 test instances). We achieve a low equal error rate of 12.1 using event statistics based on CH and HOG features. 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.