1,639 research outputs found
Video Covariance Matrix Logarithm for Human Action Recognition in Videos
International audienceIn this paper, we propose a new local spatio-temporal descriptor for videos and we propose a new approach for action recognition in videos based on the introduced descriptor. The new descriptor is called the Video Covariance Matrix Logarithm (VCML). The VCML descriptor is based on a covariance matrix representation, and it models relationships between different low-level features, such as intensity and gradient. We apply the VCML descriptor to encode appearance information of local spatio-temporal video volumes, which are extracted by the Dense Trajectories. Then, we present an extensive evaluation of the proposed VCML descriptor with the Fisher vector encoding and the Support Vector Machines on four challenging action recognition datasets. We show that the VCML descriptor achieves better results than the state-of-the-art appearance descriptors. Moreover, we present that the VCML descriptor carries complementary information to the HOG descriptor and their fusion gives a significant improvement in action recognition accuracy. Finally, we show that the VCML descriptor improves action recognition accuracy in comparison to the state-of-the-art Dense Trajectories, and that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods
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
Comparative Evaluation of Action Recognition Methods via Riemannian Manifolds, Fisher Vectors and GMMs: Ideal and Challenging Conditions
We present a comparative evaluation of various techniques for action
recognition while keeping as many variables as possible controlled. We employ
two categories of Riemannian manifolds: symmetric positive definite matrices
and linear subspaces. For both categories we use their corresponding nearest
neighbour classifiers, kernels, and recent kernelised sparse representations.
We compare against traditional action recognition techniques based on Gaussian
mixture models and Fisher vectors (FVs). We evaluate these action recognition
techniques under ideal conditions, as well as their sensitivity in more
challenging conditions (variations in scale and translation). Despite recent
advancements for handling manifolds, manifold based techniques obtain the
lowest performance and their kernel representations are more unstable in the
presence of challenging conditions. The FV approach obtains the highest
accuracy under ideal conditions. Moreover, FV best deals with moderate scale
and translation changes
Sparse Coding on Symmetric Positive Definite Manifolds using Bregman Divergences
This paper introduces sparse coding and dictionary learning for Symmetric
Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, which are often used in machine learning,
computer vision and related areas. Unlike traditional sparse coding schemes
that work in vector spaces, in this paper we discuss how SPD matrices can be
described by sparse combination of dictionary atoms, where the atoms are also
SPD matrices. We propose to seek sparse coding by embedding the space of SPD
matrices into Hilbert spaces through two types of Bregman matrix divergences.
This not only leads to an efficient way of performing sparse coding, but also
an online and iterative scheme for dictionary learning. We apply the proposed
methods to several computer vision tasks where images are represented by region
covariance matrices. Our proposed algorithms outperform state-of-the-art
methods on a wide range of classification tasks, including face recognition,
action recognition, material classification and texture categorization
Second-order Temporal Pooling for Action Recognition
Deep learning models for video-based action recognition usually generate
features for short clips (consisting of a few frames); such clip-level features
are aggregated to video-level representations by computing statistics on these
features. Typically zero-th (max) or the first-order (average) statistics are
used. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using second-order statistics.
Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable feature aggregation
scheme, dubbed temporal correlation pooling that generates an action descriptor
for a video sequence by capturing the similarities between the temporal
evolution of clip-level CNN features computed across the video. Such a
descriptor, while being computationally cheap, also naturally encodes the
co-activations of multiple CNN features, thereby providing a richer
characterization of actions than their first-order counterparts. We also
propose higher-order extensions of this scheme by computing correlations after
embedding the CNN features in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We provide
experiments on benchmark datasets such as HMDB-51 and UCF-101, fine-grained
datasets such as MPII Cooking activities and JHMDB, as well as the recent
Kinetics-600. Our results demonstrate the advantages of higher-order pooling
schemes that when combined with hand-crafted features (as is standard practice)
achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.Comment: Accepted in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV
Spatio-temporal covariance descriptors for action and gesture recognition
We propose a new action and gesture recognition method based on spatio-temporal covariance descriptors and a weighted Riemannian locality preserving projection approach that takes into account the curved space formed by the descriptors. The weighted projection is then exploited during boosting to create a final multiclass classification algorithm that employs the most useful spatio-temporal regions. We also show how the descriptors can be computed quickly through the use of integral video representations. Experiments on the UCF sport, CK+ facial expression and Cambridge hand gesture datasets indicate superior performance of the proposed method compared to several recent state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed method is robust and does not require additional processing of the videos, such as foreground detection, interest-point detection or tracking
Boosted Multiple Kernel Learning for First-Person Activity Recognition
Activity recognition from first-person (ego-centric) videos has recently
gained attention due to the increasing ubiquity of the wearable cameras. There
has been a surge of efforts adapting existing feature descriptors and designing
new descriptors for the first-person videos. An effective activity recognition
system requires selection and use of complementary features and appropriate
kernels for each feature. In this study, we propose a data-driven framework for
first-person activity recognition which effectively selects and combines
features and their respective kernels during the training. Our experimental
results show that use of Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) and Boosted MKL in
first-person activity recognition problem exhibits improved results in
comparison to the state-of-the-art. In addition, these techniques enable the
expansion of the framework with new features in an efficient and convenient
way.Comment: First published in the Proceedings of the 25th European Signal
Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2017) in 2017, published by EURASI
Extrinsic Methods for Coding and Dictionary Learning on Grassmann Manifolds
Sparsity-based representations have recently led to notable results in
various visual recognition tasks. In a separate line of research, Riemannian
manifolds have been shown useful for dealing with features and models that do
not lie in Euclidean spaces. With the aim of building a bridge between the two
realms, we address the problem of sparse coding and dictionary learning over
the space of linear subspaces, which form Riemannian structures known as
Grassmann manifolds. To this end, we propose to embed Grassmann manifolds into
the space of symmetric matrices by an isometric mapping. This in turn enables
us to extend two sparse coding schemes to Grassmann manifolds. Furthermore, we
propose closed-form solutions for learning a Grassmann dictionary, atom by
atom. Lastly, to handle non-linearity in data, we extend the proposed Grassmann
sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithms through embedding into Hilbert
spaces.
Experiments on several classification tasks (gender recognition, gesture
classification, scene analysis, face recognition, action recognition and
dynamic texture classification) show that the proposed approaches achieve
considerable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to
state-of-the-art methods such as kernelized Affine Hull Method and
graph-embedding Grassmann discriminant analysis.Comment: Appearing in International Journal of Computer Visio
When Kernel Methods meet Feature Learning: Log-Covariance Network for Action Recognition from Skeletal Data
Human action recognition from skeletal data is a hot research topic and
important in many open domain applications of computer vision, thanks to
recently introduced 3D sensors. In the literature, naive methods simply
transfer off-the-shelf techniques from video to the skeletal representation.
However, the current state-of-the-art is contended between to different
paradigms: kernel-based methods and feature learning with (recurrent) neural
networks. Both approaches show strong performances, yet they exhibit heavy, but
complementary, drawbacks. Motivated by this fact, our work aims at combining
together the best of the two paradigms, by proposing an approach where a
shallow network is fed with a covariance representation. Our intuition is that,
as long as the dynamics is effectively modeled, there is no need for the
classification network to be deep nor recurrent in order to score favorably. We
validate this hypothesis in a broad experimental analysis over 6 publicly
available datasets.Comment: 2017 IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshop
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