Human activity recognition using hierarchically-mined feature constellations

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of human activity modelling and recognition by means of a hierarchical representation of mined dense spatiotemporal features. At each level of the hierarchy, the proposed method selects feature constellations that are increasingly discriminative and characteristic of a specific action category, by taking into account how frequently they occur in that action category versus the rest of the available action categories in the training dataset. Each feature constellation consists of n-tuples of features selected in the previous level of the hierarchy and lying within a small spatiotemporal neighborhood. We use spatiotemporal Local Steering Kernel (LSK) features as a basis for our representation, due to their ability and efficiency in capturing the local structure and dynamics of the underlying activities. The proposed method is able to detect activities in unconstrained videos, by back-projecting the activated features at the locations at which they were activated. We test the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, namely the KTH and YouTube datasets of human bodily actions. The acquired results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in recognising a wide variety of activities. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.