We investigate the problem of representing an entire video using CNN features for human action recognition. Currently, limited by GPU memory, we have not been able to feed a whole video into CNN RNNs for end-to-end learning. A common practice is to use sampled frames as inputs and video labels as supervision. One major problem of this popular approach is that the local samples may not contain the information indicated by global labels. To deal with this problem, we propose to treat the deep networks trained on local inputs as local feature extractors. After extracting local features, we aggregate them into global features and train another mapping function on the same training data to map the global features into global labels. We study a set of problems regarding this new type of local features such as how to aggregate them into global features. Experimental results on HMDB51 and UCF101 datasets show that, for these new local features, a simple maximum pooling on the sparsely sampled features lead to significant performance improvement.
In traditional video representations, trajectory based approaches @cite_22 @cite_5 , especially the Dense Trajectory (DT) and IDT @cite_18 @cite_0 , are the basis of current state-of-the-art hand-crafted algorithms. These trajectory-based methods are designed to address the flaws of image-extended video features. Their superior performance validates the need for a unique representation of motion features. There have been many studies attempting to improve IDT due to its popularity. @cite_15 enhanced the performance of IDT by increasing codebook sizes and fusing multiple coding methods. @cite_7 explored ways to sub-sample and generate vocabularies for DT features. Hoai & Zisserman @cite_12 achieved superior performance on several action recognition datasets by using three techniques including data augmentation, modeling score distribution over video subsequences, and capturing the relationship among action classes. @cite_6 modeled the evolution of appearance in the video and achieved state-of-the-art results on the Hollywood2 dataset. @cite_4 proposed to extract features from videos with multiple playback speeds to achieve speed invariances. However, with the arising of deep neural network methods, these traditional methods are gradually forgotten.
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_12
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Feature trajectories have shown to be efficient for representing videos. Typically, they are extracted using the KLT tracker or matching SIFT descriptors between frames. However, the quality as well as quantity of these trajectories is often not sufficient. Inspired by the recent success of dense sampling in image classification, we propose an approach to describe videos by dense trajectories. We sample dense points from each frame and track them based on displacement information from a dense optical flow field. Given a state-of-the-art optical flow algorithm, our trajectories are robust to fast irregular motions as well as shot boundaries. Additionally, dense trajectories cover the motion information in videos well. We, also, investigate how to design descriptors to encode the trajectory information. We introduce a novel descriptor based on motion boundary histograms, which is robust to camera motion. This descriptor consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art descriptors, in particular in uncontrolled realistic videos. We evaluate our video description in the context of action classification with a bag-of-features approach. Experimental results show a significant improvement over the state of the art on four datasets of varying difficulty, i.e. KTH, YouTube, Hollywood2 and UCF sports. Most state-of-the-art action feature extractors involve differential operators, which act as highpass filters and tend to attenuate low frequency action information. This attenuation introduces bias to the resulting features and generates ill-conditioned feature matrices. The Gaussian Pyramid has been used as a feature enhancing technique that encodes scale-invariant characteristics into the feature space in an attempt to deal with this attenuation. However, at the core of the Gaussian Pyramid is a convolutional smoothing operation, which makes it incapable of generating new features at coarse scales. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel feature enhancing technique called Multi-skIp Feature Stacking (MIFS), which stacks features extracted using a family of differential filters parameterized with multiple time skips and encodes shift-invariance into the frequency space. MIFS compensates for information lost from using differential operators by recapturing information at coarse scales. This recaptured information allows us to match actions at different speeds and ranges of motion. We prove that MIFS enhances the learnability of differential-based features exponentially. The resulting feature matrices from MIFS have much smaller conditional numbers and variances than those from conventional methods. Experimental results show significantly improved performance on challenging action recognition and event detection tasks. Specifically, our method exceeds the state-of-the-arts on Hollywood2, UCF101 and UCF50 datasets and is comparable to state-of-the-arts on HMDB51 and Olympics Sports datasets. MIFS can also be used as a speedup strategy for feature extraction with minimal or no accuracy cost. 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. In this paper we present a method to capture video-wide temporal information for action recognition. We postulate that a function capable of ordering the frames of a video temporally (based on the appearance) captures well the evolution of the appearance within the video. We learn such ranking functions per video via a ranking machine and use the parameters of these as a new video representation. The proposed method is easy to interpret and implement, fast to compute and effective in recognizing a wide variety of actions. We perform a large number of evaluations on datasets for generic action recognition (Hollywood2 and HMDB51), fine-grained actions (MPII- cooking activities) and gestures (Chalearn). Results show that the proposed method brings an absolute improvement of 7–10 , while being compatible with and complementary to further improvements in appearance and local motion based methods. Human action recognition in videos is a challenging problem with wide applications. State-of-the-art approaches often adopt the popular bag-of-features representation based on isolated local patches or temporal patch trajectories, where motion patterns like object relationships are mostly discarded. This paper proposes a simple representation specifically aimed at the modeling of such motion relationships. We adopt global and local reference points to characterize motion information, so that the final representation can be robust to camera movement. Our approach operates on top of visual codewords derived from local patch trajectories, and therefore does not require accurate foreground-background separation, which is typically a necessary step to model object relationships. Through an extensive experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed representation offers very competitive performance on challenging benchmark datasets, and combining it with the bag-of-features representation leads to substantial improvement. On Hollywood2, Olympic Sports, and HMDB51 datasets, we obtain 59.5 , 80.6 and 40.7 respectively, which are the best reported results to date. 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 become the most popular method 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 a set of 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. Many efforts have been made in each step independently in different scenarios and their effect on action recognition is still unknown. Meanwhile, video data exhibits different views of visual pattern, such as static appearance and motion dynamics. Multiple descriptors are usually extracted to represent these different views. Many feature fusion methods have been developed in other areas and their influence on action recognition has never been investigated before. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive study of all steps in BoVW and different fusion methods, and uncover some good practice 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. Furthermore, based on our comprehensive study, we propose a simple yet effective representation, called hybrid representation, by exploring the complementarity of different BoVW frameworks and local descriptors. Using this representation, we obtain the state-of-the-art on the three challenging datasets: HMDB51 (61.1 ), UCF50 (92.3 ), and UCF101 (87.9 ). We propose two complementary techniques to improve the performance of action recognition systems. The first technique addresses the temporal interval ambiguity of actions by learning a classifier score distribution over video subsequences. A classifier based on this score distribution is shown to be more effective than using the maximum or average scores. The second technique learns a classifier for the relative values of action scores, capturing the correlation and exclusion between action classes. Both techniques are simple and have efficient implementations using a Least-Squares SVM. We demonstrate that taken together the techniques exceed the state-of-the-art performance by a wide margin on challenging benchmarks for human actions.