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Abstract: The extraction and quantization of local image and video descriptors for the subsequent creation of visual codebooks is a technique that has proved very effective for image and video retrieval applications. In this paper we build on this concept and propose a new set of visual descriptors that provide a local space-time description of the visual activity. The proposed descriptors are extracted at spatiotemporal salient points detected on the estimated optical flow field for a given image sequence and are based on geometrical properties of three-dimensional piecewise polynomials, namely B-splines. The latter are fitted on the spatiotemporal locations of salient points that fall within a given spatiotemporal neighborhood. Our descriptors are invariant in translation and scaling in space-time. The latter is ensured by coupling the neighborhood dimensions to the scale at which the corresponding spatiotemporal salient points are detected. In addition, in order to provide robustness against camera motion (e.g. global translation due to camera panning) we subtract the motion component that is estimated by applying local median filters on the optical flow field. The descriptors that are extracted across the whole dataset are clustered in order to create a codebook of ‘visual verbs’, where each verb corresponds to a cluster center. We use the resulting codebook in a ‘bag of verbs’ approach in order to represent the motion of the subjects within small temporal windows. Finally, we use a boosting algorithm in order to select the most discriminative temporal windows of each class and Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) for classification. The presented results using three different databases of human actions verify the effectiveness of our method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The ability to understand and manage social signals of a person we are communicating with is the core of social intelligence. Social intelligence is a facet of human intelligence that has been argued to be indispensable and perhaps the most important for success in life. This paper argues that next-generation computing needs to include the essence of social intelligence – the ability to recognize human social signals and social behaviours like turn taking, politeness, and disagreement – in order to become more effective and more efficient. Although each one of us understands the importance of social signals in everyday life situations, and in spite of recent advances in machine analysis of relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, laughter, and similar, design and development of automated systems for social signal processing (SSP) are rather difficult. This paper surveys the past efforts in solving these problems by a computer, it summarizes the relevant findings in social psychology, and it proposes a set of recommendations for enabling the development of the next generation of socially aware computing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Local descriptors are popular ways to characterize the local properties of images in various computer vision based tasks. To form the global descriptors for image regions, the first-order feature pooling is widely used. However, as the first-order pooling technique treats each dimension of local features separately, the pairwise correlations of local features are usually ignored. Encouraged by the success of recently developed second-order pooling techniques, in this paper we formulate a general second-order pooling framework and explore several analogues of the second-order average and max operations. We comprehensively investigate a variety of moments which are in the central positions to the second-order pooling technique. As a result, the superiority of the second-order standardized moment average pooling ( 2Standmap ) is suggested. We successfully apply 2Standmap to four challenging tasks namely texture classification, medical image analysis, pain expression recognition, and micro-expression recognition. It illustrates the effectiveness of 2Standmap to capture multiple cues and the generalization to both static images and spatial-temporal sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]