289 research outputs found
Simple and Complex Human Action Recognition in Constrained and Unconstrained Videos
Human action recognition plays a crucial role in visual learning applications such as video understanding and surveillance, video retrieval, human-computer interactions, and autonomous driving systems. A variety of methodologies have been proposed for human action recognition via developing of low-level features along with the bag-of-visual-word models. However, much less research has been performed on the compound of pre-processing, encoding and classification stages. This dissertation focuses on enhancing the action recognition performances via ensemble learning, hybrid classifier, hierarchical feature representation, and key action perception methodologies. Action variation is one of the crucial challenges in video analysis and action recognition. We address this problem by proposing the hybrid classifier (HC) to discriminate actions which contain similar forms of motion features such as walking, running, and jogging. Aside from that, we show and proof that the fusion of various appearance-based and motion features can boost the simple and complex action recognition performance. The next part of the dissertation introduces pooled-feature representation (PFR) which is derived from a double phase encoding framework (DPE). Considering that a given unconstrained video is composed of a sequence of simple frames, the first phase of DPE generates temporal sub-volumes from the video and represents them individually by employing the proposed improved rank pooling (IRP) method. The second phase constructs the pool of features by fusing the represented vectors from the first phase. The pool is compressed and then encoded to provide video-parts vector (VPV). The DPE framework allows distilling the video representation and hierarchically extracting new information. Compared with recent video encoding approaches, VPV can preserve the higher-level information through standard encoding of low-level features in two phases. Furthermore, the encoded vectors from both phases of DPE are fused along with a compression stage to develop PFR
Log-Euclidean Bag of Words for Human Action Recognition
Representing videos by densely extracted local space-time features has
recently become a popular approach for analysing actions. In this paper, we
tackle the problem of categorising human actions by devising Bag of Words (BoW)
models based on covariance matrices of spatio-temporal features, with the
features formed from histograms of optical flow. Since covariance matrices form
a special type of Riemannian manifold, the space of Symmetric Positive Definite
(SPD) matrices, non-Euclidean geometry should be taken into account while
discriminating between covariance matrices. To this end, we propose to embed
SPD manifolds to Euclidean spaces via a diffeomorphism and extend the BoW
approach to its Riemannian version. The proposed BoW approach takes into
account the manifold geometry of SPD matrices during the generation of the
codebook and histograms. Experiments on challenging human action datasets show
that the proposed method obtains notable improvements in discrimination
accuracy, in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods
NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding
Research on depth-based human activity analysis achieved outstanding
performance and demonstrated the effectiveness of 3D representation for action
recognition. The existing depth-based and RGB+D-based action recognition
benchmarks have a number of limitations, including the lack of large-scale
training samples, realistic number of distinct class categories, diversity in
camera views, varied environmental conditions, and variety of human subjects.
In this work, we introduce a large-scale dataset for RGB+D human action
recognition, which is collected from 106 distinct subjects and contains more
than 114 thousand video samples and 8 million frames. This dataset contains 120
different action classes including daily, mutual, and health-related
activities. We evaluate the performance of a series of existing 3D activity
analysis methods on this dataset, and show the advantage of applying deep
learning methods for 3D-based human action recognition. Furthermore, we
investigate a novel one-shot 3D activity recognition problem on our dataset,
and a simple yet effective Action-Part Semantic Relevance-aware (APSR)
framework is proposed for this task, which yields promising results for
recognition of the novel action classes. We believe the introduction of this
large-scale dataset will enable the community to apply, adapt, and develop
various data-hungry learning techniques for depth-based and RGB+D-based human
activity understanding. [The dataset is available at:
http://rose1.ntu.edu.sg/Datasets/actionRecognition.asp]Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(TPAMI
A random forest approach to segmenting and classifying gestures
This thesis investigates a gesture segmentation and recognition scheme that employs a random forest classification model. A complete gesture recognition system should localize and classify each gesture from a given gesture vocabulary, within a continuous video stream. Thus, the system must determine the start and end points of each gesture in time, as well as accurately recognize the class label of each gesture. We propose a unified approach that performs the tasks of temporal segmentation and classification simultaneously. Our method trains a random forest classification model to recognize gestures from a given vocabulary, as presented in a training dataset of video plus 3D body joint locations, as well as out-of-vocabulary (non-gesture) instances. Given an input video stream, our trained model is applied to candidate gestures using sliding windows at multiple temporal scales. The class label with the highest classifier confidence is selected, and its corresponding scale is used to determine the segmentation boundaries in time. We evaluated our formulation in segmenting and recognizing gestures from two different benchmark datasets: the NATOPS dataset of 9,600 gesture instances from a vocabulary of 24 aircraft handling signals, and the CHALEARN dataset of 7,754 gesture instances from a vocabulary of 20 Italian communication gestures. The performance of our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods that employ Hidden Markov Models or Hidden Conditional Random Fields on the NATOPS dataset. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages of using our model
Spatio-Temporal Facial Expression Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Conditional Random Fields
Automated Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has been a challenging task for
decades. Many of the existing works use hand-crafted features such as LBP, HOG,
LPQ, and Histogram of Optical Flow (HOF) combined with classifiers such as
Support Vector Machines for expression recognition. These methods often require
rigorous hyperparameter tuning to achieve good results. Recently Deep Neural
Networks (DNN) have shown to outperform traditional methods in visual object
recognition. In this paper, we propose a two-part network consisting of a
DNN-based architecture followed by a Conditional Random Field (CRF) module for
facial expression recognition in videos. The first part captures the spatial
relation within facial images using convolutional layers followed by three
Inception-ResNet modules and two fully-connected layers. To capture the
temporal relation between the image frames, we use linear chain CRF in the
second part of our network. We evaluate our proposed network on three publicly
available databases, viz. CK+, MMI, and FERA. Experiments are performed in
subject-independent and cross-database manners. Our experimental results show
that cascading the deep network architecture with the CRF module considerably
increases the recognition of facial expressions in videos and in particular it
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the cross-database experiments and
yields comparable results in the subject-independent experiments.Comment: To appear in 12th IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture
Recognition Worksho
MoDeep: A Deep Learning Framework Using Motion Features for Human Pose Estimation
In this work, we propose a novel and efficient method for articulated human
pose estimation in videos using a convolutional network architecture, which
incorporates both color and motion features. We propose a new human body pose
dataset, FLIC-motion, that extends the FLIC dataset with additional motion
features. We apply our architecture to this dataset and report significantly
better performance than current state-of-the-art pose detection systems
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