VideoGraph: Recognizing Minutes-Long Human Activities in Videos

Many human activities take minutes to unfold. To represent them, related works opt for statistical pooling, which neglects the temporal structure. Others opt for convolutional methods, as CNN and Non-Local. While successful in learning temporal concepts, they are short of modeling minutes-long temporal dependencies. We propose VideoGraph, a method to achieve the best of two worlds: represent minutes-long human activities and learn their underlying temporal structure. VideoGraph learns a graph-based representation for human activities. The graph, its nodes and edges are learned entirely from video datasets, making VideoGraph applicable to problems without node-level annotation. The result is improvements over related works on benchmarks: Epic-Kitchen and Breakfast. Besides, we demonstrate that VideoGraph is able to learn the temporal structure of human activities in minutes-long videos

3D Human Activity Recognition with Reconfigurable Convolutional Neural Networks

Human activity understanding with 3D/depth sensors has received increasing attention in multimedia processing and interactions. This work targets on developing a novel deep model for automatic activity recognition from RGB-D videos. We represent each human activity as an ensemble of cubic-like video segments, and learn to discover the temporal structures for a category of activities, i.e. how the activities to be decomposed in terms of classification. Our model can be regarded as a structured deep architecture, as it extends the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by incorporating structure alternatives. Specifically, we build the network consisting of 3D convolutions and max-pooling operators over the video segments, and introduce the latent variables in each convolutional layer manipulating the activation of neurons. Our model thus advances existing approaches in two aspects: (i) it acts directly on the raw inputs (grayscale-depth data) to conduct recognition instead of relying on hand-crafted features, and (ii) the model structure can be dynamically adjusted accounting for the temporal variations of human activities, i.e. the network configuration is allowed to be partially activated during inference. For model training, we propose an EM-type optimization method that iteratively (i) discovers the latent structure by determining the decomposed actions for each training example, and (ii) learns the network parameters by using the back-propagation algorithm. Our approach is validated in challenging scenarios, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. A large human activity database of RGB-D videos is presented in addition.Comment: This manuscript has 10 pages with 9 figures, and a preliminary version was published in ACM MM'14 conferenc

Activity recognition from videos with parallel hypergraph matching on GPUs

In this paper, we propose a method for activity recognition from videos based on sparse local features and hypergraph matching. We benefit from special properties of the temporal domain in the data to derive a sequential and fast graph matching algorithm for GPUs. Traditionally, graphs and hypergraphs are frequently used to recognize complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the minimization of a difficult discrete energy function mixing geometric or structural terms with data attached terms involving appearance features. Traditional methods solve this minimization problem approximately, for instance with spectral techniques. In this work, instead of solving the problem approximatively, the exact solution for the optimal assignment is calculated in parallel on GPUs. The graphical structure is simplified and regularized, which allows to derive an efficient recursive minimization algorithm. The algorithm distributes subproblems over the calculation units of a GPU, which solves them in parallel, allowing the system to run faster than real-time on medium-end GPUs