Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Log-Euclidean Bag of Words for Human Action Recognition

Representing videos by densely extracted local space-time features has recently become a popular approach for analysing actions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of categorising human actions by devising Bag of Words (BoW) models based on covariance matrices of spatio-temporal features, with the features formed from histograms of optical flow. Since covariance matrices form a special type of Riemannian manifold, the space of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, non-Euclidean geometry should be taken into account while discriminating between covariance matrices. To this end, we propose to embed SPD manifolds to Euclidean spaces via a diffeomorphism and extend the BoW approach to its Riemannian version. The proposed BoW approach takes into account the manifold geometry of SPD matrices during the generation of the codebook and histograms. Experiments on challenging human action datasets show that the proposed method obtains notable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods

Capturing the relative distribution of features for action recognition

This paper presents an approach to the categorisation of spatio-temporal activity in video, which is based solely on the relative distribution of feature points. Introducing a Relative Motion Descriptor for actions in video, we show that the spatio-temporal distribution of features alone (without explicit appearance information) effectively describes actions, and demonstrate performance consistent with state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we propose that for actions where noisy examples exist, it is not optimal to group all action examples as a single class. Therefore, rather than engineering features that attempt to generalise over noisy examples, our method follows a different approach: We make use of Random Sampling Consensus (RANSAC) to automatically discover and reject outlier examples within classes. We evaluate the Relative Motion Descriptor and outlier rejection approaches on four action datasets, and show that outlier rejection using RANSAC provides a consistent and notable increase in performance, and demonstrate superior performance to more complex multiple-feature based approaches

Modulation of NF-κB-dependent gene transcription using programmable DNA minor groove binders

Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is a transcription factor that regulates various aspects of immune response, cell death, and differentiation as well as cancer. In this study we introduce the Py-Im polyamide 1 that binds preferentially to the sequences 5′-WGGWWW-3′ and 5′GGGWWW-3′. The compound is capable of binding to κB sites and reducing the expression of various NF-κB–driven genes including IL6 and IL8 by qRT-PCR. Chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments demonstrate a reduction of p65 occupancy within the proximal promoters of those genes. Genome-wide expression analysis by RNA-seq compares the DNA-binding polyamide with the well-characterized NF-κB inhibitor PS1145, identifies overlaps and differences in affected gene groups, and shows that both affect comparable numbers of TNF-α–inducible genes. Inhibition of NF-κB DNA binding via direct displacement of the transcription factor is a potential alternative to the existing antagonists

Action recognition in video using a spatial-temporal graph-based feature representation

We propose a video graph based human action recognition framework. Given an input video sequence, we extract spatio-temporal local features and construct a video graph to incorporate appearance and motion constraints to reflect the spatio-temporal dependencies among features. them. In particular, we extend a popular dbscan density-based clustering algorithm to form an intuitive video graph. During training, we estimate a linear SVM classifier using the standard Bag-of-words method. During classification, we apply Graph-Cut optimization to find the most frequent action label in the constructed graph and assign this label to the test video sequence. The proposed approach achieves stateof-the-art performance with standard human action recognition benchmarks, namely KTH and UCF-sports datasets and competitive results for the Hollywood (HOHA) dataset