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Human activity localization aims at recognizing contents and detecting locations of activities in video sequences. With an increasing number of untrimmed video data, traditional activity localization methods always suffer from two major limitations. First, detailed annotations are needed in most existing methods, i.e., bounding-box annotations in every frame, which are both expensive and time consuming. Second, the search space is too large for 3D activity localization, which requires generating a large number of proposals. In this paper, we propose a unified deep Q-network with weak reward and weak loss (DWRLQN) to address the two problems. Certain weak knowledge and weak constraints involving the temporal dynamics of human activity are incorporated into a deep reinforcement learning framework under sparse spatial supervision, where we assume that only a portion of frames are annotated in each video sequence. Experiments on UCF-Sports, UCF-101 and sub-JHMDB demonstrate that our proposed model achieves promising performance by only utilizing a very small number of proposals. More importantly, our DWRLQN trained with partial annotations and weak information even outperforms fully supervised methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time object tracking has wide applications in time-critical multimedia processing areas such as motion analysis and human–computer interaction. It remains a hard problem to balance between accuracy and speed. In this paper, we present a fast real-time context-based visual tracking algorithm with a new saliency prior context (SPC) model. Based on the probability formulation, the tracking problem is solved by sequentially maximizing the computed confidence map of target location in each video frame. To handle the various cases of feature distributions generated from different targets and their contexts, we exploit low-level features as well as fast spectral analysis for saliency to build a new prior context model. Then, based on this model and a spatial context model learned online, a confidence map is computed and the target location is estimated. In addition, under this framework, the tracking procedure can be accelerated by the fast Fourier transform. Therefore, the new method generally achieves a real-time running speed. Extensive experiments show that our tracking algorithm based on the proposed SPC model achieves real-time computation efficiency with overall best performance comparing with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are two key issues in human activity recognition: spatial dependencies and temporal dependencies. Most recent methods focus on only one of them, and thus do not have sufficient descriptive power to recognize complex activity. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical spatio-temporal model (HSTM) to solve the problem by modeling spatial and temporal constraints simultaneously. The new HSTM is a two-layer hidden conditional random field (HCRF), where the bottom-layer HCRF aims at describing spatial relations in each frame and learning more discriminative representations, and the top-layer HCRF utilizes these high-level features to characterize temporal relations in the whole video sequence. The new HSTM takes advantage of the bottom layer as the building blocks for the top layer and it aggregates evidence from local to global level. A novel learning algorithm is derived to train all model parameters efficiently and its effectiveness is validated theoretically. Experimental results show that the HSTM can successfully classify human activities with higher accuracies on single-person actions (UCF) than other existing methods. More importantly, the HSTM also achieves superior performance on more practical interactions, including human–human interactional activities (UT-Interaction, BIT-Interaction, and CASIA) and human–object interactional activities (Gupta video dataset). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we focus on the improvements of appearance representation for multihuman tracking. Many previous methods extracted low-level appearance features, such as color histogram and texture, even combined with spatial information for each frame. These methods ignore the temporal distribution of features. The features of each frame may not be stable due to illumination, human pose variation, and image noise. In order to improve it, we propose a novel appearance representation called the spatial–temporal appearance model based on the statistical distribution of Gaussian mixture model (GMM). It represents the appearance of a tracklet as a whole with dynamic spatial and temporal information. The spatial information is the dynamic subregions. The temporal information is the dynamic duration time of each subregion. Each subregion is modeled as the weighted Gaussian distribution of GMM. The online expectation-maximization (online EM) algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of GMM. Then, we propose a tracklet association method using Bayesian prediction and Jensen–Shannon divergence. The Bayesian prediction is used to predict the locations of targets. The Jensen–Shannon divergence is used to compute the distance of spatial–temporal appearance distribution between two tracklets. Finally, we test our approach on four challenging datasets (TRECVID, CAVIAR, ETH, and EPFL Terrace) and achieve good results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiperson activity recognition in videos is a challenging task, due to the complexity of interactions among multiple persons. In this paper, a new statistical model, named coupled observation decomposed hidden Markov model (CODHMM), is presented to model multiperson activities in videos. A human activity that involves multiple persons is analyzed in two levels: the individual level that describes each individual's motion details and the interaction level that expresses the shared information among multiple persons. The two levels are modeled by two hidden Markov chains that are interdependent and interact with each other. The observation in each chain at each time slice is decomposed into subobservations according to the number of features and the number of persons. For each activity to be recognized, a CODHMM is built and model parameters are learnt by a generalized expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Given an input video that contains an unknown activity, maximum likelihood algorithms are developed to classify it into one of the learnt activity categories. Experimental results show that the CODHMM can successfully classify human activities involving multiple persons with high accuracy and low computations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]