A tree-based approach to integrated action localization, recognition and segmentation

Abstract

A tree-based approach to integrated action segmentation, localization and recognition is proposed. An action is represented as a sequence of joint hog-flow descriptors extracted independently from each frame. During training, a set of action prototypes is first learned based on a k-means clustering, and then a binary tree model is constructed from the set of action prototypes based on hierarchical k-means clustering. Each tree node is characterized by a shape-motion descriptor and a rejection threshold, and an action segmentation mask is defined for leaf nodes (corresponding to a prototype). During testing, an action is localized by mapping each test frame to a nearest neighbor prototype using a fast matching method to search the learned tree, followed by global filtering refinement. An action is recognized by maximizing the sum of the joint probabilities of the action category and action prototype over test frames. Our approach does not explicitly rely on human tracking and background subtraction, and enables action localization and recognition in realistic and challenging conditions (such as crowded backgrounds). Experimental results show that our approach can achieve recognition rates of 100% on the CMU action dataset and 100% on the Weizmann dataset. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.