Fast evolution of Internet technologies has led to an explosive growth of video data available in the public domain and created unprecedented challenges in the analysis, organization, management, and control of such content. The problems encountered in video analysis such as identifying a video in a large database (e.g. detecting pirated content in YouTube), putting together video fragments, finding similarities and common ancestry between different versions of a video, have analogous counterpart problems in genetic research and analysis of DNA and protein sequences. In this paper, we exploit the analogy between genetic sequences and videos and propose an approach to video analysis motivated by genomic research. Representing video information as video DNA sequences and applying bioinformatic algorithms allows to search, match, and compare videos in large-scale databases. We show an application for content-based metadata mapping between versions of annotated video.
The aim of this paper is to address recognition of natural human actions in diverse and realistic video settings. This challenging but important subject has mostly been ignored in the past due to several problems one of which is the lack of realistic and annotated video datasets. Our first contribution is to address this limitation and to investigate the use of movie scripts for automatic annotation of human actions in videos. We evaluate alternative methods for action retrieval from scripts and show benefits of a text-based classifier. Using the retrieved action samples for visual learning, we next turn to the problem of action classification in video. We present a new method for video classification that builds upon and extends several recent ideas including local space-time features, space-time pyramids and multi-channel non-linear SVMs. The method is shown to improve state-of-the-art results on the standard KTH action dataset by achieving 91.8 accuracy. Given the inherent problem of noisy labels in automatic annotation, we particularly investigate and show high tolerance of our method to annotation errors in the training set. We finally apply the method to learning and classifying challenging action classes in movies and show promising results. Real-world action recognition applications require the development of systems which are fast, can handle a large variety of actions without a priori knowledge of the type of actions, need a minimal number of parameters, and necessitate as short as possible learning stage. In this paper, we suggest such an approach. We regard dynamic activities as long-term temporal objects, which are characterized by spatio-temporal features at multiple temporal scales. Based on this, we design a simple statistical distance measure between video sequences which captures the similarities in their behavioral content. This measure is nonparametric and can thus handle a wide range of complex dynamic actions. Having a behavior-based distance measure between sequences, we use it for a variety of tasks, including: video indexing, temporal segmentation, and action-based video clustering. These tasks are performed without prior knowledge of the types of actions, their models, or their temporal extents We address the problem of detecting irregularities in visual data, e.g., detecting suspicious behaviors in video sequences, or identifying salient patterns in images. The term "irregular" depends on the context in which the "regular" or "valid" are defined. Yet, it is not realistic to expect explicit definition of all possible valid configurations for a given context. We pose the problem of determining the validity of visual data as a process of constructing a puzzle: We try to compose a new observed image region or a new video segment ("the query") using chunks of data ("pieces of puzzle") extracted from previous visual examples ("the database"). Regions in the observed data which can be composed using large contiguous chunks of data from the database are considered very likely, whereas regions in the observed data which cannot be composed from the database (or can be composed, but only using small fragmented pieces) are regarded as unlikely suspicious. The problem is posed as an inference process in a probabilistic graphical model. We show applications of this approach to identifying saliency in images and video, for detecting suspicious behaviors and for automatic visual inspection for quality assurance. A video copy detection system is a content-based search engine [1]. It aims at deciding whether a query video segment is a copy of a video from the indexed dataset or not. A copy may be distorted in various ways. If the system finds a matching video segment, it returns the name of the database video and the time stamp where the query was copied from. Fig. 1 illustrates the video copyright detection system we have developed for the TRECVID 2008 evaluation campaign. The components of this system are detailed in Section 2. Most of them are derived from the state-of-the-art image search engine introduced in [2]. It builds upon the bag-of-features image search system proposed in [3], and provides a more precise representation by adding 1) a Hamming embedding and 2) weak geometric consistency constraints. The HE provides binary signatures that refine the visual word based matching. WGC filters matching descriptors that are not consistent in terms of angle and scale. HE and WGC are integrated within an inverted file and are efficiently exploited for all indexed frames, even for a very large dataset. In our best runs, we have indexed 2 million keyframes, represented by 800 million local descriptors. We give some conclusions drawn from our experiments in Section 3. Finally, in section 4 we briefly present our run for the high-level feature detection task. This paper presents a comparative study of methods for video copy detection. Different state-of-the-art techniques, using various kinds of descriptors and voting functions, are described: global video descriptors, based on spatial and temporal features; local descriptors based on spatial, temporal as well as spatio-temporal information. Robust voting functions is adapted to these techniques to enhance their performance and to compare them. Then, a dedicated framework for evaluating these systems is proposed. All the techniques are tested and compared within the same framework, by evaluating their robustness under single and mixed image transformations, as well as for different lengths of video segments. We discuss the performance of each approach according to the transformations and the applications considered. Local methods demonstrate their superior performance over the global ones, when detecting video copies subjected to various transformations.