67,644 research outputs found
Efficient Human Activity Recognition in Large Image and Video Databases
Vision-based human action recognition has attracted considerable interest in recent research for its applications to video surveillance, content-based search, healthcare, and interactive games. Most existing research deals with building informative feature descriptors, designing efficient and robust algorithms, proposing versatile and challenging datasets, and fusing multiple modalities. Often, these approaches build on certain conventions such as the use of motion cues to determine video descriptors, application of off-the-shelf classifiers, and single-factor classification of videos. In this thesis, we deal with important but overlooked issues such as efficiency, simplicity, and scalability of human activity recognition in different application scenarios: controlled video environment (e.g.~indoor surveillance), unconstrained videos (e.g.~YouTube), depth or skeletal data (e.g.~captured by Kinect), and person images (e.g.~Flicker). In particular, we are interested in answering questions like (a) is it possible to efficiently recognize human actions in controlled videos without temporal cues? (b) given that the large-scale unconstrained video data are often of high dimension low sample size (HDLSS) nature, how to efficiently recognize human actions in such data? (c) considering the rich 3D motion information available from depth or motion capture sensors, is it possible to recognize both the actions and the actors using only the motion dynamics of underlying activities? and (d) can motion information from monocular videos be used for automatically determining saliency regions for recognizing actions in still images
Apparent sharpness of 3D video when one eye's view is more blurry.
When the images presented to each eye differ in sharpness, the fused percept remains relatively sharp. Here, we measure this effect by showing stereoscopic videos that have been blurred for one eye, or both eyes, and psychophysically determining when they appear equally sharp. For a range of blur magnitudes, the fused percept always appeared significantly sharper than the blurrier view. From these data, we investigate to what extent discarding high spatial frequencies from just one eye's view reduces the bandwidth necessary to transmit perceptually sharp 3D content. We conclude that relatively high-resolution video transmission has the most potential benefit from this method
Neural correlates of sexual cue reactivity in individuals with and without compulsive sexual behaviours
Although compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB) has been conceptualized as a "behavioural" addiction and common or overlapping neural circuits may govern the processing of natural and drug rewards, little is known regarding the responses to sexually explicit materials in individuals with and without CSB. Here, the processing of cues of varying sexual content was assessed in individuals with and without CSB, focusing on neural regions identified in prior studies of drug-cue reactivity. 19 CSB subjects and 19 healthy volunteers were assessed using functional MRI comparing sexually explicit videos with non-sexual exciting videos. Ratings of sexual desire and liking were obtained. Relative to healthy volunteers, CSB subjects had greater desire but similar liking scores in response to the sexually explicit videos. Exposure to sexually explicit cues in CSB compared to non-CSB subjects was associated with activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate, ventral striatum and amygdala. Functional connectivity of the dorsal anterior cingulate-ventral striatum-amygdala network was associated with subjective sexual desire (but not liking) to a greater degree in CSB relative to non-CSB subjects. The dissociation between desire or wanting and liking is consistent with theories of incentive motivation underlying CSB as in drug addictions. Neural differences in the processing of sexual-cue reactivity were identified in CSB subjects in regions previously implicated in drug-cue reactivity studies. The greater engagement of corticostriatal limbic circuitry in CSB following exposure to sexual cues suggests neural mechanisms underlying CSB and potential biological targets for interventions
Spontaneous Subtle Expression Detection and Recognition based on Facial Strain
Optical strain is an extension of optical flow that is capable of quantifying
subtle changes on faces and representing the minute facial motion intensities
at the pixel level. This is computationally essential for the relatively new
field of spontaneous micro-expression, where subtle expressions can be
technically challenging to pinpoint. In this paper, we present a novel method
for detecting and recognizing micro-expressions by utilizing facial optical
strain magnitudes to construct optical strain features and optical strain
weighted features. The two sets of features are then concatenated to form the
resultant feature histogram. Experiments were performed on the CASME II and
SMIC databases. We demonstrate on both databases, the usefulness of optical
strain information and more importantly, that our best approaches are able to
outperform the original baseline results for both detection and recognition
tasks. A comparison of the proposed method with other existing spatio-temporal
feature extraction approaches is also presented.Comment: 21 pages (including references), single column format, accepted to
Signal Processing: Image Communication journa
Digging Deeper into Egocentric Gaze Prediction
This paper digs deeper into factors that influence egocentric gaze. Instead
of training deep models for this purpose in a blind manner, we propose to
inspect factors that contribute to gaze guidance during daily tasks. Bottom-up
saliency and optical flow are assessed versus strong spatial prior baselines.
Task-specific cues such as vanishing point, manipulation point, and hand
regions are analyzed as representatives of top-down information. We also look
into the contribution of these factors by investigating a simple recurrent
neural model for ego-centric gaze prediction. First, deep features are
extracted for all input video frames. Then, a gated recurrent unit is employed
to integrate information over time and to predict the next fixation. We also
propose an integrated model that combines the recurrent model with several
top-down and bottom-up cues. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets
reveal that (1) spatial biases are strong in egocentric videos, (2) bottom-up
saliency models perform poorly in predicting gaze and underperform spatial
biases, (3) deep features perform better compared to traditional features, (4)
as opposed to hand regions, the manipulation point is a strong influential cue
for gaze prediction, (5) combining the proposed recurrent model with bottom-up
cues, vanishing points and, in particular, manipulation point results in the
best gaze prediction accuracy over egocentric videos, (6) the knowledge
transfer works best for cases where the tasks or sequences are similar, and (7)
task and activity recognition can benefit from gaze prediction. Our findings
suggest that (1) there should be more emphasis on hand-object interaction and
(2) the egocentric vision community should consider larger datasets including
diverse stimuli and more subjects.Comment: presented at WACV 201
Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements
Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand
recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has
several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature
representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects
such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions.
Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual
information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by
decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object
statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure
the importance of each of these information channels by systematically
incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to
the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of
linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the
coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to
individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of 20th ACM International
Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, CO, US
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