Learning space-time structures for action recognition and localization

In this thesis the problem of automatic human action recognition and localization in videos is studied. In this problem, our goal is to recognize the category of the human action that is happening in the video, and also to localize the action in space and/or time. This problem is challenging due to the complexity of the human actions, the large intra-class variations and the distraction of backgrounds. Human actions are inherently structured patterns of body movements. However, past works are inadequate in learning the space-time structures in human actions and exploring them for better recognition and localization. In this thesis new methods are proposed that exploit such space-time structures for effective human action recognition and localization in videos, including sports videos, YouTube videos, TV programs and movies. A new local space-time video representation, the hierarchical Space-Time Segments, is first proposed. Using this new video representation, ensembles of hierarchical spatio-temporal trees, discovered directly from the training videos, are constructed to model the hierarchical, spatial and temporal structures of human actions. This proposed approach achieves promising performances in action recognition and localization on challenging benchmark datasets. Moreover, the discovered trees show good cross-dataset generalizability: trees learned on one dataset can be used to recognize and localize similar actions in another dataset. To handle large scale data, a deep model is explored that learns temporal progression of the actions using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), which is a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Two novel ranking losses are proposed to train the model to better capture the temporal structures of actions for accurate action recognition and temporal localization. This model achieves state-of-art performance on a large scale video dataset. A deep model usually employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn visual features from video frames. The problem of utilizing web action images for training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is also studied: training CNN typically requires a large number of training videos, but the findings of this study show that web action images can be utilized as additional training data to significantly reduce the burden of video training data collection

Online, Supervised and Unsupervised Action Localization in Videos

Action recognition classifies a given video among a set of action labels, whereas action localization determines the location of an action in addition to its class. The overall aim of this dissertation is action localization. Many of the existing action localization approaches exhaustively search (spatially and temporally) for an action in a video. However, as the search space increases with high resolution and longer duration videos, it becomes impractical to use such sliding window techniques. The first part of this dissertation presents an efficient approach for localizing actions by learning contextual relations between different video regions in training. In testing, we use the context information to estimate the probability of each supervoxel belonging to the foreground action and use Conditional Random Field (CRF) to localize actions. In the above method and typical approaches to this problem, localization is performed in an offline manner where all the video frames are processed together. This prevents timely localization and prediction of actions/interactions - an important consideration for many tasks including surveillance and human-machine interaction. Therefore, in the second part of this dissertation we propose an online approach to the challenging problem of localization and prediction of actions/interactions in videos. In this approach, we use human poses and superpixels in each frame to train discriminative appearance models and perform online prediction of actions/interactions with Structural SVM. Above two approaches rely on human supervision in the form of assigning action class labels to videos and annotating actor bounding boxes in each frame of training videos. Therefore, in the third part of this dissertation we address the problem of unsupervised action localization. Given unlabeled videos without annotations, this approach aims at: 1) Discovering action classes using a discriminative clustering approach, and 2) Localizing actions using a variant of Knapsack problem