Activity representation with motion hierarchies

International audienceComplex activities, e.g., pole vaulting, are composed of a variable number of sub-events connected by complex spatio-temporal relations, whereas simple actions can be represented as sequences of short temporal parts. In this paper, we learn hierarchical representations of activity videos in an unsupervised manner. These hierarchies of mid-level motion components are data-driven decompositions specific to each video. We introduce a spectral divisive clustering algorithm to efficiently extract a hierarchy over a large number of tracklets (i.e., local trajectories). We use this structure to represent a video as an unordered binary tree. We model this tree using nested histograms of local motion features. We provide an efficient positive definite kernel that computes the structural and visual similarity of two hierarchical decompositions by relying on models of their parent-child relations. We present experimental results on four recent challenging benchmarks: the High Five dataset [Patron-Perez et al, 2010], the Olympics Sports dataset [Niebles et al, 2010], the Hollywood 2 dataset [Marszalek et al, 2009], and the HMDB dataset [Kuehne et al, 2011]. We show that pervideo hierarchies provide additional information for activity recognition. Our approach improves over unstructured activity models, baselines using other motion decomposition algorithms, and the state of the art

Hierarchical Bag of Paths for Kernel Based Shape Classification

Graph kernels methods are based on an implicit embedding of graphs within a vector space of large dimension. This implicit embedding allows to apply to graphs methods which where until recently solely reserved to numerical data. Within the shape classification framework, graphs are often produced by a skeletonization step which is sensitive to noise. We propose in this paper to integrate the robustness to structural noise by using a kernel based on a bag of path where each path is associated to a hierarchy encoding successive simplifications of the path. Several experiments prove the robustness and the flexibility of our approach compared to alternative shape classification methods

Hierarchical Bag of Paths for Kernel Based Shape Classification

International audienceGraph kernels methods are based on an implicit embedding of graphs within a vector space of large dimension. This implicit embedding allows to apply to graphs methods which where until recently solely reserved to numerical data. Within the shape classification framework, graphs are often produced by a skeletonization step which is sensitive to noise. We propose in this paper to integrate the robustness to structural noise by using a kernel based on a bag of path where each path is associated to a hierarchy encoding successive simplifications of the path. Several experiments prove the robustness and the flexibility of our approach compared to alternative shape classification methods