Directional space-time oriented gradients for 3D visual pattern analysis

Abstract

Various visual tasks such as the recognition of human actions, gestures, facial expressions, and classification of dynamic textures require modeling and the representation of spatio-temporal information. In this paper, we propose representing space-time patterns using directional spatio-temporal oriented gradients. In the proposed approach, a 3D video patch is represented by a histogram of oriented gradients over nine symmetric spatio-temporal planes. Video comparison is achieved through a positive definite similarity kernel that is learnt by multiple kernel learning. A rich spatio-temporal descriptor with a simple trade-off between discriminatory power and invariance properties is thereby obtained. To evaluate the proposed approach, we consider three challenging visual recognition tasks, namely the classification of dynamic textures, human gestures and human actions. Our evaluations indicate that the proposed approach attains significant classification improvements in recognition accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art methods such as LBP-TOP, 3D-SIFT, HOG3D, tensor canonical correlation analysis, and dynamical fractal analysis. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.