STV-based Video Feature Processing for Action Recognition

In comparison to still image-based processes, video features can provide rich and intuitive information about dynamic events occurred over a period of time, such as human actions, crowd behaviours, and other subject pattern changes. Although substantial progresses have been made in the last decade on image processing and seen its successful applications in face matching and object recognition, video-based event detection still remains one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision research due to its complex continuous or discrete input signals, arbitrary dynamic feature definitions, and the often ambiguous analytical methods. In this paper, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) and region intersection (RI) based 3D shape-matching method has been proposed to facilitate the definition and recognition of human actions recorded in videos. The distinctive characteristics and the performance gain of the devised approach stemmed from a coefficient factor-boosted 3D region intersection and matching mechanism developed in this research. This paper also reported the investigation into techniques for efficient STV data filtering to reduce the amount of voxels (volumetric-pixels) that need to be processed in each operational cycle in the implemented system. The encouraging features and improvements on the operational performance registered in the experiments have been discussed at the end

Learning Spatiotemporal Features for Infrared Action Recognition with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Infrared (IR) imaging has the potential to enable more robust action recognition systems compared to visible spectrum cameras due to lower sensitivity to lighting conditions and appearance variability. While the action recognition task on videos collected from visible spectrum imaging has received much attention, action recognition in IR videos is significantly less explored. Our objective is to exploit imaging data in this modality for the action recognition task. In this work, we propose a novel two-stream 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture by introducing the discriminative code layer and the corresponding discriminative code loss function. The proposed network processes IR image and the IR-based optical flow field sequences. We pretrain the 3D CNN model on the visible spectrum Sports-1M action dataset and finetune it on the Infrared Action Recognition (InfAR) dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first application of the 3D CNN to action recognition in the IR domain. We conduct an elaborate analysis of different fusion schemes (weighted average, single and double-layer neural nets) applied to different 3D CNN outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art average precision (AP) performances on the InfAR dataset: (1) the proposed two-stream 3D CNN achieves the best reported 77.5% AP, and (2) our 3D CNN model applied to the optical flow fields achieves the best reported single stream 75.42% AP

Fast human activity recognition based on structure and motion

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Pattern Recognition Letters. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.We present a method for the recognition of human activities. The proposed approach is based on the construction of a set of templates for each activity as well as on the measurement of the motion in each activity. Templates are designed so that they capture the structural and motion information that is most discriminative among activities. The direct motion measurements capture the amount of translational motion in each activity. The two features are fused at the recognition stage. Recognition is achieved in two steps by calculating the similarity between the templates and motion features of the test and reference activities. The proposed methodology is experimentally assessed and is shown to yield excellent performance.European Commissio