Creating and exploring semantic annotation for behaviour analysis

Abstract

Providing ground truth is essential for activity recognition and behaviour analysis as it is needed for providing training data in methods of supervised learning, for providing context information for knowledge-based methods, and for quantifying the recognition performance. Semantic annotation extends simple symbolic labelling by assigning semantic meaning to the label, enabling further reasoning. In this paper, we present a novel approach to semantic annotation by means of plan operators. We provide a step by step description of the workflow to manually creating the ground truth annotation. To validate our approach, we create semantic annotation of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) grand challenge dataset, which is often cited, but, due to missing and incomplete annotation, almost never used. We show that it is possible to derive hidden properties, behavioural routines, and changes in initial and goal conditions in the annotated dataset. We evaluate the quality of the annotation by calculating the interrater reliability between two annotators who labelled the dataset. The results show very good overlapping (Cohen’s k of 0.8) between the annotators. The produced annotation and the semantic models are publicly available, in order to enable further usage of the CMU grand challenge dataset.