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

DC-image for real time compressed video matching

This chapter presents a suggested framework for video matching based on local features extracted from the DC-image of MPEG compressed videos, without full decompression. In addition, the relevant arguments and supporting evidences are discussed. Several local feature detectors will be examined to select the best for matching using the DC-image. Two experiments are carried to support the above. The first is comparing between the DC-image and I-frame, in terms of matching performance and computation complexity. The second experiment compares between using local features and global features regarding compressed video matching with respect to the DC-image. The results confirmed that the use of DC-image, despite its highly reduced size, it is promising as it produces higher matching precision, compared to the full I-frame. Also, SIFT, as a local feature, outperforms most of the standard global features. On the other hand, its computation complexity is relatively higher, but it is still within the real-time margin which leaves a space for further optimizations that can be done to improve this computation complexity

Content-based Video Retrieval by Integrating Spatio-Temporal and Stochastic Recognition of Events

As amounts of publicly available video data grow the need to query this data efficiently becomes significant. Consequently content-based retrieval of video data turns out to be a challenging and important problem. We address the specific aspect of inferring semantics automatically from raw video data. In particular, we introduce a new video data model that supports the integrated use of two different approaches for mapping low-level features to high-level concepts. Firstly, the model is extended with a rule-based approach that supports spatio-temporal formalization of high-level concepts, and then with a stochastic approach. Furthermore, results on real tennis video data are presented, demonstrating the validity of both approaches, as well us advantages of their integrated us

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