26,893 research outputs found
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
Invariance of visual operations at the level of receptive fields
Receptive field profiles registered by cell recordings have shown that
mammalian vision has developed receptive fields tuned to different sizes and
orientations in the image domain as well as to different image velocities in
space-time. This article presents a theoretical model by which families of
idealized receptive field profiles can be derived mathematically from a small
set of basic assumptions that correspond to structural properties of the
environment. The article also presents a theory for how basic invariance
properties to variations in scale, viewing direction and relative motion can be
obtained from the output of such receptive fields, using complementary
selection mechanisms that operate over the output of families of receptive
fields tuned to different parameters. Thereby, the theory shows how basic
invariance properties of a visual system can be obtained already at the level
of receptive fields, and we can explain the different shapes of receptive field
profiles found in biological vision from a requirement that the visual system
should be invariant to the natural types of image transformations that occur in
its environment.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figure
Spatial-Aware Object Embeddings for Zero-Shot Localization and Classification of Actions
We aim for zero-shot localization and classification of human actions in
video. Where traditional approaches rely on global attribute or object
classification scores for their zero-shot knowledge transfer, our main
contribution is a spatial-aware object embedding. To arrive at spatial
awareness, we build our embedding on top of freely available actor and object
detectors. Relevance of objects is determined in a word embedding space and
further enforced with estimated spatial preferences. Besides local object
awareness, we also embed global object awareness into our embedding to maximize
actor and object interaction. Finally, we exploit the object positions and
sizes in the spatial-aware embedding to demonstrate a new spatio-temporal
action retrieval scenario with composite queries. Action localization and
classification experiments on four contemporary action video datasets support
our proposal. Apart from state-of-the-art results in the zero-shot localization
and classification settings, our spatial-aware embedding is even competitive
with recent supervised action localization alternatives.Comment: ICC
Objects2action: Classifying and localizing actions without any video example
The goal of this paper is to recognize actions in video without the need for
examples. Different from traditional zero-shot approaches we do not demand the
design and specification of attribute classifiers and class-to-attribute
mappings to allow for transfer from seen classes to unseen classes. Our key
contribution is objects2action, a semantic word embedding that is spanned by a
skip-gram model of thousands of object categories. Action labels are assigned
to an object encoding of unseen video based on a convex combination of action
and object affinities. Our semantic embedding has three main characteristics to
accommodate for the specifics of actions. First, we propose a mechanism to
exploit multiple-word descriptions of actions and objects. Second, we
incorporate the automated selection of the most responsive objects per action.
And finally, we demonstrate how to extend our zero-shot approach to the
spatio-temporal localization of actions in video. Experiments on four action
datasets demonstrate the potential of our approach
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