We present a system for recognising human activity given a symbolic representation of video content. The input of our system is a set of time-stamped short-term activities (STA) detected on video frames. The output is a set of recognised long-term activities (LTA), which are pre-dened temporal combinations of STA. The constraints on the STA that, if satised, lead to the recognition of a LTA, have been expressed using a dialect of the Event Calculus. In order to handle the uncertainty that naturally occurs in human activity recognition, we adapted this dialect to a state-of-the-art probabilistic logic programming framework. We present a detailed evaluation and comparison of the crisp and probabilistic approaches through experimentation on a benchmark dataset of human surveillance videos.
This article falls under the problem of the symbolic monitoring of real-time complex systems or of video interpretation systems. Among the various techniques used for the on-line monitoring, we are interested here in the temporal scenario recognition. In order to reduce the complexity of the recognition and, consequently, to improve its performance, we explore two methods: the first one is the focus on particular events (in practice, uncommon ones) and the second one is the factorization of common temporal scenarios in order to do a hierarchical recognition. In this article, we present both concepts and merge them to propose a focused hierarchical recognition. This approach merges and generalizes the two main approaches in symbolic recognition of temporal scenarios: the Store Totally Recognized Scenarios (STRS) approach and the Store Partially Recognized Scenarios (SPRS) approach. 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.