Spatial-Aware Object Embeddings for Zero-Shot Localization and Classification of Actions

We aim for zero-shot localization and classification of human actions in video. Where traditional approaches rely on global attribute or object classification scores for their zero-shot knowledge transfer, our main contribution is a spatial-aware object embedding. To arrive at spatial awareness, we build our embedding on top of freely available actor and object detectors. Relevance of objects is determined in a word embedding space and further enforced with estimated spatial preferences. Besides local object awareness, we also embed global object awareness into our embedding to maximize actor and object interaction. Finally, we exploit the object positions and sizes in the spatial-aware embedding to demonstrate a new spatio-temporal action retrieval scenario with composite queries. Action localization and classification experiments on four contemporary action video datasets support our proposal. Apart from state-of-the-art results in the zero-shot localization and classification settings, our spatial-aware embedding is even competitive with recent supervised action localization alternatives.Comment: ICC

K-Space at TRECVid 2007

In this paper we describe K-Space participation in TRECVid 2007. K-Space participated in two tasks, high-level feature extraction and interactive search. We present our approaches for each of these activities and provide a brief analysis of our results. Our high-level feature submission utilized multi-modal low-level features which included visual, audio and temporal elements. Specific concept detectors (such as Face detectors) developed by K-Space partners were also used. We experimented with different machine learning approaches including logistic regression and support vector machines (SVM). Finally we also experimented with both early and late fusion for feature combination. This year we also participated in interactive search, submitting 6 runs. We developed two interfaces which both utilized the same retrieval functionality. Our objective was to measure the effect of context, which was supported to different degrees in each interface, on user performance. The first of the two systems was a ‘shot’ based interface, where the results from a query were presented as a ranked list of shots. The second interface was ‘broadcast’ based, where results were presented as a ranked list of broadcasts. Both systems made use of the outputs of our high-level feature submission as well as low-level visual features

Measuring concept similarities in multimedia ontologies: analysis and evaluations

The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing

Semantics-based selection of everyday concepts in visual lifelogging

Concept-based indexing, based on identifying various semantic concepts appearing in multimedia, is an attractive option for multimedia retrieval and much research tries to bridge the semantic gap between the media’s low-level features and high-level semantics. Research into concept-based multimedia retrieval has generally focused on detecting concepts from high quality media such as broadcast TV or movies, but it is not well addressed in other domains like lifelogging where the original data is captured with poorer quality. We argue that in noisy domains such as lifelogging, the management of data needs to include semantic reasoning in order to deduce a set of concepts to represent lifelog content for applications like searching, browsing or summarisation. Using semantic concepts to manage lifelog data relies on the fusion of automatically-detected concepts to provide a better understanding of the lifelog data. In this paper, we investigate the selection of semantic concepts for lifelogging which includes reasoning on semantic networks using a density-based approach. In a series of experiments we compare different semantic reasoning approaches and the experimental evaluations we report on lifelog data show the efficacy of our approach

Inexpensive fusion methods for enhancing feature detection

Recent successful approaches to high-level feature detection in image and video data have treated the problem as a pattern classification task. These typically leverage the techniques learned from statistical machine learning, coupled with ensemble architectures that create multiple feature detection models. Once created, co-occurrence between learned features can be captured to further boost performance. At multiple stages throughout these frameworks, various pieces of evidence can be fused together in order to boost performance. These approaches whilst very successful are computationally expensive, and depending on the task, require the use of significant computational resources. In this paper we propose two fusion methods that aim to combine the output of an initial basic statistical machine learning approach with a lower-quality information source, in order to gain diversity in the classified results whilst requiring only modest computing resources. Our approaches, validated experimentally on TRECVid data, are designed to be complementary to existing frameworks and can be regarded as possible replacements for the more computationally expensive combination strategies used elsewhere

Strategies for Searching Video Content with Text Queries or Video Examples

The large number of user-generated videos uploaded on to the Internet everyday has led to many commercial video search engines, which mainly rely on text metadata for search. However, metadata is often lacking for user-generated videos, thus these videos are unsearchable by current search engines. Therefore, content-based video retrieval (CBVR) tackles this metadata-scarcity problem by directly analyzing the visual and audio streams of each video. CBVR encompasses multiple research topics, including low-level feature design, feature fusion, semantic detector training and video search/reranking. We present novel strategies in these topics to enhance CBVR in both accuracy and speed under different query inputs, including pure textual queries and query by video examples. Our proposed strategies have been incorporated into our submission for the TRECVID 2014 Multimedia Event Detection evaluation, where our system outperformed other submissions in both text queries and video example queries, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approaches

A framework for automatic semantic video annotation

The rapidly increasing quantity of publicly available videos has driven research into developing automatic tools for indexing, rating, searching and retrieval. Textual semantic representations, such as tagging, labelling and annotation, are often important factors in the process of indexing any video, because of their user-friendly way of representing the semantics appropriate for search and retrieval. Ideally, this annotation should be inspired by the human cognitive way of perceiving and of describing videos. The difference between the low-level visual contents and the corresponding human perception is referred to as the ‘semantic gap’. Tackling this gap is even harder in the case of unconstrained videos, mainly due to the lack of any previous information about the analyzed video on the one hand, and the huge amount of generic knowledge required on the other. This paper introduces a framework for the Automatic Semantic Annotation of unconstrained videos. The proposed framework utilizes two non-domain-specific layers: low-level visual similarity matching, and an annotation analysis that employs commonsense knowledgebases. Commonsense ontology is created by incorporating multiple-structured semantic relationships. Experiments and black-box tests are carried out on standard video databases for action recognition and video information retrieval. White-box tests examine the performance of the individual intermediate layers of the framework, and the evaluation of the results and the statistical analysis show that integrating visual similarity matching with commonsense semantic relationships provides an effective approach to automated video annotation

An MPEG-7 scheme for semantic content modelling and filtering of digital video

Abstract Part 5 of the MPEG-7 standard specifies Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS); that is, the format multimedia content models should conform to in order to ensure interoperability across multiple platforms and applications. However, the standard does not specify how the content or the associated model may be filtered. This paper proposes an MPEG-7 scheme which can be deployed for digital video content modelling and filtering. The proposed scheme, COSMOS-7, produces rich and multi-faceted semantic content models and supports a content-based filtering approach that only analyses content relating directly to the preferred content requirements of the user. We present details of the scheme, front-end systems used for content modelling and filtering and experiences with a number of users