Spatiotemporal Features and Deep Learning Methods for Video Classification

Classification of human actions from real-world video data is one of the most important topics in computer vision and it has been an interesting and challenging research topic in recent decades. It is commonly used in many applications such as video retrieval, video surveillance, human-computer interaction, robotics, and health care. Therefore, robust, fast, and accurate action recognition systems are highly demanded. Deep learning techniques developed for action recognition from the image domain can be extended to the video domain. Nonetheless, deep learning solutions for two-dimensional image data cannot be directly applicable for the video domain because of the larger scale and temporal nature of the video. Specifically, each frame involves spatial information, while the sequence of frames carries temporal information. Therefore, this study focused on both spatial and temporal features, aiming to improve the accuracy of human action recognition from videos by making use of spatiotemporal information. In this thesis, several deep learning architectures were proposed to model both spatial and temporal components. Firstly, a novel deep neural network was developed for video classification by combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Secondly, an action template-based keyframe extraction method was proposed and temporal clues between action regions were used to extract more informative keyframes. Thirdly, a novel decision-level fusion rule was proposed to better combine spatial and temporal aspects of videos in two-stream networks. Finally, an extensive investigation was conducted to find out how to combine various information from feature and decision fusion to improve the video classification performance in multi-stream neural networks. Extensive experiments were conducted using the proposed methods and the results highlighted that using both spatial and temporal information is required in video classification architectures and employing temporal information effectively in multi-stream deep neural networks is crucial to improve video classification accuracy

Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey

Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics, domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey, touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the reader

Appearance-and-Relation Networks for Video Classification

Spatiotemporal feature learning in videos is a fundamental problem in computer vision. This paper presents a new architecture, termed as Appearance-and-Relation Network (ARTNet), to learn video representation in an end-to-end manner. ARTNets are constructed by stacking multiple generic building blocks, called as SMART, whose goal is to simultaneously model appearance and relation from RGB input in a separate and explicit manner. Specifically, SMART blocks decouple the spatiotemporal learning module into an appearance branch for spatial modeling and a relation branch for temporal modeling. The appearance branch is implemented based on the linear combination of pixels or filter responses in each frame, while the relation branch is designed based on the multiplicative interactions between pixels or filter responses across multiple frames. We perform experiments on three action recognition benchmarks: Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51, demonstrating that SMART blocks obtain an evident improvement over 3D convolutions for spatiotemporal feature learning. Under the same training setting, ARTNets achieve superior performance on these three datasets to the existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR18 camera-ready version. Code & models available at https://github.com/wanglimin/ARTNe

Learning Spatiotemporal Features for Infrared Action Recognition with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Infrared (IR) imaging has the potential to enable more robust action recognition systems compared to visible spectrum cameras due to lower sensitivity to lighting conditions and appearance variability. While the action recognition task on videos collected from visible spectrum imaging has received much attention, action recognition in IR videos is significantly less explored. Our objective is to exploit imaging data in this modality for the action recognition task. In this work, we propose a novel two-stream 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture by introducing the discriminative code layer and the corresponding discriminative code loss function. The proposed network processes IR image and the IR-based optical flow field sequences. We pretrain the 3D CNN model on the visible spectrum Sports-1M action dataset and finetune it on the Infrared Action Recognition (InfAR) dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first application of the 3D CNN to action recognition in the IR domain. We conduct an elaborate analysis of different fusion schemes (weighted average, single and double-layer neural nets) applied to different 3D CNN outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art average precision (AP) performances on the InfAR dataset: (1) the proposed two-stream 3D CNN achieves the best reported 77.5% AP, and (2) our 3D CNN model applied to the optical flow fields achieves the best reported single stream 75.42% AP

Fully-Coupled Two-Stream Spatiotemporal Networks for Extremely Low Resolution Action Recognition

A major emerging challenge is how to protect people's privacy as cameras and computer vision are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, including in smart devices inside homes. A potential solution is to capture and record just the minimum amount of information needed to perform a task of interest. In this paper, we propose a fully-coupled two-stream spatiotemporal architecture for reliable human action recognition on extremely low resolution (e.g., 12x16 pixel) videos. We provide an efficient method to extract spatial and temporal features and to aggregate them into a robust feature representation for an entire action video sequence. We also consider how to incorporate high resolution videos during training in order to build better low resolution action recognition models. We evaluate on two publicly-available datasets, showing significant improvements over the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 pagers, 5 figures, published in WACV 201