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

Robust Methods for Visual Tracking and Model Alignment

The ubiquitous presence of cameras and camera networks needs the development of robust visual analytics algorithms. As the building block of many video visual surveillance tasks, a robust visual tracking algorithm plays an important role in achieving the goal of automatic and robust surveillance. In practice, it is critical to know when and where the tracking algorithm fails so that remedial measures can be taken to resume tracking. We propose a novel performance evaluation strategy for tracking systems using a time-reversed Markov chain. We also present a novel bidirectional tracker to achieve better robustness. Instead of looking only forward in the time domain, we incorporate both forward and backward processing of video frames using a time-reversibility constraint. When the objects of interest in surveillance applications have relatively stable structures, the parameterized shape model of objects can be usually built or learned from sample images, which allows us to perform more accurate tracking. We present a machine learning method to learn a scoring function without local extrema to guide the gradient descent/accent algorithm and find the optimal parameters of the shape model. These algorithms greatly improve the robustness of video analysis systems in practice

A framework for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) scene retrieval from medical simulation videos based on object and activity detection.

In this thesis, we propose a framework to detect and retrieve CPR activity scenes from medical simulation videos. Medical simulation is a modern training method for medical students, where an emergency patient condition is simulated on human-like mannequins and the students act upon. These simulation sessions are recorded by the physician, for later debriefing. With the increasing number of simulation videos, automatic detection and retrieval of specific scenes became necessary. The proposed framework for CPR scene retrieval, would eliminate the conventional approach of using shot detection and frame segmentation techniques. Firstly, our work explores the application of Histogram of Oriented Gradients in three dimensions (HOG3D) to retrieve the scenes containing CPR activity. Secondly, we investigate the use of Local Binary Patterns in Three Orthogonal Planes (LBPTOP), which is the three dimensional extension of the popular Local Binary Patterns. This technique is a robust feature that can detect specific activities from scenes containing multiple actors and activities. Thirdly, we propose an improvement to the above mentioned methods by a combination of HOG3D and LBP-TOP. We use decision level fusion techniques to combine the features. We prove experimentally that the proposed techniques and their combination out-perform the existing system for CPR scene retrieval. Finally, we devise a method to detect and retrieve the scenes containing the breathing bag activity, from the medical simulation videos. The proposed framework is tested and validated using eight medical simulation videos and the results are presented

Domain-adaptive discriminative one-shot learning of gestures

The objective of this paper is to recognize gestures in videos - both localizing the gesture and classifying it into one of multiple classes. We show that the performance of a gesture classifier learnt from a single (strongly supervised) training example can be boosted significantly using a 'reservoir' of weakly supervised gesture examples (and that the performance exceeds learning from the one-shot example or reservoir alone). The one-shot example and weakly supervised reservoir are from different 'domains' (different people, different videos, continuous or non-continuous gesturing, etc), and we propose a domain adaptation method for human pose and hand shape that enables gesture learning methods to generalise between them. We also show the benefits of using the recently introduced Global Alignment Kernel [12], instead of the standard Dynamic Time Warping that is generally used for time alignment. The domain adaptation and learning methods are evaluated on two large scale challenging gesture datasets: one for sign language, and the other for Italian hand gestures. In both cases performance exceeds the previous published results, including the best skeleton-classification-only entry in the 2013 ChaLearn challenge