108 research outputs found
Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey
Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in
complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics,
domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action
analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled
environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of
videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of
applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific
milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading
to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to
provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing
human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods
that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep
learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey,
touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the
hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the
reader
Beyond Gauss: Image-Set Matching on the Riemannian Manifold of PDFs
State-of-the-art image-set matching techniques typically implicitly model
each image-set with a Gaussian distribution. Here, we propose to go beyond
these representations and model image-sets as probability distribution
functions (PDFs) using kernel density estimators. To compare and match
image-sets, we exploit Csiszar f-divergences, which bear strong connections to
the geodesic distance defined on the space of PDFs, i.e., the statistical
manifold. Furthermore, we introduce valid positive definite kernels on the
statistical manifolds, which let us make use of more powerful classification
schemes to match image-sets. Finally, we introduce a supervised dimensionality
reduction technique that learns a latent space where f-divergences reflect the
class labels of the data. Our experiments on diverse problems, such as
video-based face recognition and dynamic texture classification, evidence the
benefits of our approach over the state-of-the-art image-set matching methods
On Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Encoding: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In the field of face recognition, Sparse Representation (SR) has received
considerable attention during the past few years. Most of the relevant
literature focuses on holistic descriptors in closed-set identification
applications. The underlying assumption in SR-based methods is that each class
in the gallery has sufficient samples and the query lies on the subspace
spanned by the gallery of the same class. Unfortunately, such assumption is
easily violated in the more challenging face verification scenario, where an
algorithm is required to determine if two faces (where one or both have not
been seen before) belong to the same person. In this paper, we first discuss
why previous attempts with SR might not be applicable to verification problems.
We then propose an alternative approach to face verification via SR.
Specifically, we propose to use explicit SR encoding on local image patches
rather than the entire face. The obtained sparse signals are pooled via
averaging to form multiple region descriptors, which are then concatenated to
form an overall face descriptor. Due to the deliberate loss spatial relations
within each region (caused by averaging), the resulting descriptor is robust to
misalignment & various image deformations. Within the proposed framework, we
evaluate several SR encoding techniques: l1-minimisation, Sparse Autoencoder
Neural Network (SANN), and an implicit probabilistic technique based on
Gaussian Mixture Models. Thorough experiments on AR, FERET, exYaleB, BANCA and
ChokePoint datasets show that the proposed local SR approach obtains
considerably better and more robust performance than several previous
state-of-the-art holistic SR methods, in both verification and closed-set
identification problems. The experiments also show that l1-minimisation based
encoding has a considerably higher computational than the other techniques, but
leads to higher recognition rates
Generalized Rank Pooling for Activity Recognition
Most popular deep models for action recognition split video sequences into
short sub-sequences consisting of a few frames; frame-based features are then
pooled for recognizing the activity. Usually, this pooling step discards the
temporal order of the frames, which could otherwise be used for better
recognition. Towards this end, we propose a novel pooling method, generalized
rank pooling (GRP), that takes as input, features from the intermediate layers
of a CNN that is trained on tiny sub-sequences, and produces as output the
parameters of a subspace which (i) provides a low-rank approximation to the
features and (ii) preserves their temporal order. We propose to use these
parameters as a compact representation for the video sequence, which is then
used in a classification setup. We formulate an objective for computing this
subspace as a Riemannian optimization problem on the Grassmann manifold, and
propose an efficient conjugate gradient scheme for solving it. Experiments on
several activity recognition datasets show that our scheme leads to
state-of-the-art performance.Comment: Accepted at IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201
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
Bags of Affine Subspaces for Robust Object Tracking
We propose an adaptive tracking algorithm where the object is modelled as a
continuously updated bag of affine subspaces, with each subspace constructed
from the object's appearance over several consecutive frames. In contrast to
linear subspaces, affine subspaces explicitly model the origin of subspaces.
Furthermore, instead of using a brittle point-to-subspace distance during the
search for the object in a new frame, we propose to use a subspace-to-subspace
distance by representing candidate image areas also as affine subspaces.
Distances between subspaces are then obtained by exploiting the non-Euclidean
geometry of Grassmann manifolds. Experiments on challenging videos (containing
object occlusions, deformations, as well as variations in pose and
illumination) indicate that the proposed method achieves higher tracking
accuracy than several recent discriminative trackers.Comment: in International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques
and Applications, 201
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