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

Characterizing and correcting for the effect of sensor noise in the dynamic mode decomposition

Dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) provides a practical means of extracting insightful dynamical information from fluids datasets. Like any data processing technique, DMD's usefulness is limited by its ability to extract real and accurate dynamical features from noise-corrupted data. Here we show analytically that DMD is biased to sensor noise, and quantify how this bias depends on the size and noise level of the data. We present three modifications to DMD that can be used to remove this bias: (i) a direct correction of the identified bias using known noise properties, (ii) combining the results of performing DMD forwards and backwards in time, and (iii) a total least-squares-inspired algorithm. We discuss the relative merits of each algorithm, and demonstrate the performance of these modifications on a range of synthetic, numerical, and experimental datasets. We further compare our modified DMD algorithms with other variants proposed in recent literature