Beyond Short Snippets: Deep Networks for Video Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been extensively applied for image recognition problems giving state-of-the-art results on recognition, detection, segmentation and retrieval. In this work we propose and evaluate several deep neural network architectures to combine image information across a video over longer time periods than previously attempted. We propose two methods capable of handling full length videos. The first method explores various convolutional temporal feature pooling architectures, examining the various design choices which need to be made when adapting a CNN for this task. The second proposed method explicitly models the video as an ordered sequence of frames. For this purpose we employ a recurrent neural network that uses Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells which are connected to the output of the underlying CNN. Our best networks exhibit significant performance improvements over previously published results on the Sports 1 million dataset (73.1% vs. 60.9%) and the UCF-101 datasets with (88.6% vs. 88.0%) and without additional optical flow information (82.6% vs. 72.8%)

Discriminatively Trained Latent Ordinal Model for Video Classification

We study the problem of video classification for facial analysis and human action recognition. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for "smile", running and jumping for "highjump"). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF -- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations and on three challenging human action datasets. We also validate the method with qualitative results and show that they largely support the intuitions behind the method.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TPAMI. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0150

Temporal Localization of Fine-Grained Actions in Videos by Domain Transfer from Web Images

We address the problem of fine-grained action localization from temporally untrimmed web videos. We assume that only weak video-level annotations are available for training. The goal is to use these weak labels to identify temporal segments corresponding to the actions, and learn models that generalize to unconstrained web videos. We find that web images queried by action names serve as well-localized highlights for many actions, but are noisily labeled. To solve this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method that takes weak video labels and noisy image labels as input, and generates localized action frames as output. This is achieved by cross-domain transfer between video frames and web images, using pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks. We then use the localized action frames to train action recognition models with long short-term memory networks. We collect a fine-grained sports action data set FGA-240 of more than 130,000 YouTube videos. It has 240 fine-grained actions under 85 sports activities. Convincing results are shown on the FGA-240 data set, as well as the THUMOS 2014 localization data set with untrimmed training videos.Comment: Camera ready version for ACM Multimedia 201

Saliency-guided video classification via adaptively weighted learning

Video classification is productive in many practical applications, and the recent deep learning has greatly improved its accuracy. However, existing works often model video frames indiscriminately, but from the view of motion, video frames can be decomposed into salient and non-salient areas naturally. Salient and non-salient areas should be modeled with different networks, for the former present both appearance and motion information, and the latter present static background information. To address this problem, in this paper, video saliency is predicted by optical flow without supervision firstly. Then two streams of 3D CNN are trained individually for raw frames and optical flow on salient areas, and another 2D CNN is trained for raw frames on non-salient areas. For the reason that these three streams play different roles for each class, the weights of each stream are adaptively learned for each class. Experimental results show that saliency-guided modeling and adaptively weighted learning can reinforce each other, and we achieve the state-of-the-art results.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, accepted by ICME 201

Human Motion Analysis for Efficient Action Recognition

Automatic understanding of human actions is at the core of several application domains, such as content-based indexing, human-computer interaction, surveillance, and sports video analysis. The recent advances in digital platforms and the exponential growth of video and image data have brought an urgent quest for intelligent frameworks to automatically analyze human motion and predict their corresponding action based on visual data and sensor signals. This thesis presents a collection of methods that targets human action recognition using different action modalities. The first method uses the appearance modality and classifies human actions based on heterogeneous global- and local-based features of scene and humanbody appearances. The second method harnesses 2D and 3D articulated human poses and analyizes the body motion using a discriminative combination of the parts’ velocities, locations, and correlations histograms for action recognition. The third method presents an optimal scheme for combining the probabilistic predictions from different action modalities by solving a constrained quadratic optimization problem. In addition to the action classification task, we present a study that compares the utility of different pose variants in motion analysis for human action recognition. In particular, we compare the recognition performance when 2D and 3D poses are used. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our pose-based method for action recognition in spotting and segmenting motion gestures in real time from a continuous stream of an input video for the recognition of the Italian sign gesture language

Action recognition based on efficient deep feature learning in the spatio-temporal domain

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Hand-crafted feature functions are usually designed based on the domain knowledge of a presumably controlled environment and often fail to generalize, as the statistics of real-world data cannot always be modeled correctly. Data-driven feature learning methods, on the other hand, have emerged as an alternative that often generalize better in uncontrolled environments. We present a simple, yet robust, 2D convolutional neural network extended to a concatenated 3D network that learns to extract features from the spatio-temporal domain of raw video data. The resulting network model is used for content-based recognition of videos. Relying on a 2D convolutional neural network allows us to exploit a pretrained network as a descriptor that yielded the best results on the largest and challenging ILSVRC-2014 dataset. Experimental results on commonly used benchmarking video datasets demonstrate that our results are state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and computational time without requiring any preprocessing (e.g., optic flow) or a priori knowledge on data capture (e.g., camera motion estimation), which makes it more general and flexible than other approaches. Our implementation is made available.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft