Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations via Dense Trajectory Clustering

This paper addresses the task of unsupervised learning of representations for action recognition in videos. Previous works proposed to utilize future prediction, or other domain-specific objectives to train a network, but achieved only limited success. In contrast, in the relevant field of image representation learning, simpler, discrimination-based methods have recently bridged the gap to fully-supervised performance. We first propose to adapt two top performing objectives in this class - instance recognition and local aggregation, to the video domain. In particular, the latter approach iterates between clustering the videos in the feature space of a network and updating it to respect the cluster with a non-parametric classification loss. We observe promising performance, but qualitative analysis shows that the learned representations fail to capture motion patterns, grouping the videos based on appearance. To mitigate this issue, we turn to the heuristic-based IDT descriptors, that were manually designed to encode motion patterns in videos. We form the clusters in the IDT space, using these descriptors as a an unsupervised prior in the iterative local aggregation algorithm. Our experiments demonstrates that this approach outperform prior work on UCF101 and HMDB51 action recognition benchmarks. We also qualitatively analyze the learned representations and show that they successfully capture video dynamics

Learning Deep Representations of Appearance and Motion for Anomalous Event Detection

We present a novel unsupervised deep learning framework for anomalous event detection in complex video scenes. While most existing works merely use hand-crafted appearance and motion features, we propose Appearance and Motion DeepNet (AMDN) which utilizes deep neural networks to automatically learn feature representations. To exploit the complementary information of both appearance and motion patterns, we introduce a novel double fusion framework, combining both the benefits of traditional early fusion and late fusion strategies. Specifically, stacked denoising autoencoders are proposed to separately learn both appearance and motion features as well as a joint representation (early fusion). Based on the learned representations, multiple one-class SVM models are used to predict the anomaly scores of each input, which are then integrated with a late fusion strategy for final anomaly detection. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available video surveillance datasets, showing competitive performance with respect to state of the art approaches.Comment: Oral paper in BMVC 201

Unsupervised Human Action Detection by Action Matching

We propose a new task of unsupervised action detection by action matching. Given two long videos, the objective is to temporally detect all pairs of matching video segments. A pair of video segments are matched if they share the same human action. The task is category independent---it does not matter what action is being performed---and no supervision is used to discover such video segments. Unsupervised action detection by action matching allows us to align videos in a meaningful manner. As such, it can be used to discover new action categories or as an action proposal technique within, say, an action detection pipeline. Moreover, it is a useful pre-processing step for generating video highlights, e.g., from sports videos. We present an effective and efficient method for unsupervised action detection. We use an unsupervised temporal encoding method and exploit the temporal consistency in human actions to obtain candidate action segments. We evaluate our method on this challenging task using three activity recognition benchmarks, namely, the MPII Cooking activities dataset, the THUMOS15 action detection benchmark and a new dataset called the IKEA dataset. On the MPII Cooking dataset we detect action segments with a precision of 21.6% and recall of 11.7% over 946 long video pairs and over 5000 ground truth action segments. Similarly, on THUMOS dataset we obtain 18.4% precision and 25.1% recall over 5094 ground truth action segment pairs.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR 2017 Workshop

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