Foreground Detection in Camouflaged Scenes

Foreground detection has been widely studied for decades due to its importance in many practical applications. Most of the existing methods assume foreground and background show visually distinct characteristics and thus the foreground can be detected once a good background model is obtained. However, there are many situations where this is not the case. Of particular interest in video surveillance is the camouflage case. For example, an active attacker camouflages by intentionally wearing clothes that are visually similar to the background. In such cases, even given a decent background model, it is not trivial to detect foreground objects. This paper proposes a texture guided weighted voting (TGWV) method which can efficiently detect foreground objects in camouflaged scenes. The proposed method employs the stationary wavelet transform to decompose the image into frequency bands. We show that the small and hardly noticeable differences between foreground and background in the image domain can be effectively captured in certain wavelet frequency bands. To make the final foreground decision, a weighted voting scheme is developed based on intensity and texture of all the wavelet bands with weights carefully designed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results.

Online Action Recognition based on Incremental Learning of Weighted Covariance Descriptors

Different from traditional action recognition based on video segments, online action recognition aims to recognize actions from unsegmented streams of data in a continuous manner. One way for online recognition is based on the evidence accumulation over time to make predictions from stream videos. This paper presents a fast yet effective method to recognize actions from stream of noisy skeleton data, and a novel weighted covariance descriptor is adopted to accumulate evidence. In particular, a fast incremental updating method for the weighted covariance descriptor is developed for accumulation of temporal information and online prediction. The weighted covariance descriptor takes the following principles into consideration: past frames have less contribution for recognition and recent and informative frames such as key frames contribute more to the recognition. The online recognition is achieved using a simple nearest neighbor search against a set of offline trained action models. Experimental results on MSC-12 Kinect Gesture dataset and our newly constructed online action recognition dataset have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed method.

Skeleton-based Action Recognition Using LSTM and CNN

Recent methods based on 3D skeleton data have achieved outstanding performance due to its conciseness, robustness, and view-independent representation. With the development of deep learning, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based learning methods have achieved promising performance for action recognition. However, for CNN-based methods, it is inevitable to loss temporal information when a sequence is encoded into images. In order to capture as much spatial-temporal information as possible, LSTM and CNN are adopted to conduct effective recognition with later score fusion. In addition, experimental results show that the score fusion between CNN and LSTM performs better than that between LSTM and LSTM for the same feature. Our method achieved state-of-the-art results on NTU RGB+D datasets for 3D human action analysis. The proposed method achieved 87.40% in terms of accuracy and ranked $1^{st}$ place in Large Scale 3D Human Activity Analysis Challenge in Depth Videos.

Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Recognition: A Survey

This paper summarises and analyses the cross-dataset recognition transfer learning techniques with the emphasis on what kinds of methods can be used when the available source and target data are presented in different forms for boosting the target task. This paper for the first time summarises several transferring criteria in details from the concept level, which are the key bases to guide what kind of knowledge to transfer between datasets. In addition, a taxonomy of cross-dataset scenarios and problems is proposed according the properties of data that define how different datasets are diverged, thereby review the recent advances on each specific problem under different scenarios. Moreover, some real world applications and corresponding commonly used benchmarks of cross-dataset recognition are reviewed. Lastly, several future directions are identified.

A Fully Trainable Network with RNN-based Pooling

Pooling is an important component in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for aggregating features and reducing computational burden. Compared with other components such as convolutional layers and fully connected layers which are completely learned from data, the pooling component is still handcrafted such as max pooling and average pooling. This paper proposes a learnable pooling function using recurrent neural networks (RNN) so that the pooling can be fully adapted to data and other components of the network, leading to an improved performance. Such a network with learnable pooling function is referred to as a fully trainable network (FTN). Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed RNN-based pooling can well approximate the existing pooling functions and improve the performance of the network. Especially for small networks, the proposed FTN can improve the performance by seven percentage points in terms of error rate on the CIFAR-10 dataset compared with the traditional CNN.

Joint Geometrical and Statistical Alignment for Visual Domain Adaptation

This paper presents a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for cross-domain visual recognition. We propose a unified framework that reduces the shift between domains both statistically and geometrically, referred to as Joint Geometrical and Statistical Alignment (JGSA). Specifically, we learn two coupled projections that project the source domain and target domain data into low dimensional subspaces where the geometrical shift and distribution shift are reduced simultaneously. The objective function can be solved efficiently in a closed form. Extensive experiments have verified that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on a synthetic dataset and three different real world cross-domain visual recognition tasks.

Investigation of Different Skeleton Features for CNN-based 3D Action Recognition

Deep learning techniques are being used in skeleton based action recognition tasks and outstanding performance has been reported. Compared with RNN based methods which tend to overemphasize temporal information, CNN-based approaches can jointly capture spatio-temporal information from texture color images encoded from skeleton sequences. There are several skeleton-based features that have proven effective in RNN-based and handcrafted-feature-based methods. However, it remains unknown whether they are suitable for CNN-based approaches. This paper proposes to encode five spatial skeleton features into images with different encoding methods. In addition, the performance implication of different joints used for feature extraction is studied. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D dataset for 3D human action analysis. An accuracy of 75.32\% was achieved in Large Scale 3D Human Activity Analysis Challenge in Depth Videos.

Scene Flow to Action Map: A New Representation for RGB-D based Action Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

Scene flow describes the motion of 3D objects in real world and potentially could be the basis of a good feature for 3D action recognition. However, its use for action recognition, especially in the context of convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), has not been previously studied. In this paper, we propose the extraction and use of scene flow for action recognition from RGB-D data. Previous works have considered the depth and RGB modalities as separate channels and extract features for later fusion. We take a different approach and consider the modalities as one entity, thus allowing feature extraction for action recognition at the beginning. Two key questions about the use of scene flow for action recognition are addressed: how to organize the scene flow vectors and how to represent the long term dynamics of videos based on scene flow. In order to calculate the scene flow correctly on the available datasets, we propose an effective self-calibration method to align the RGB and depth data spatially without knowledge of the camera parameters. Based on the scene flow vectors, we propose a new representation, namely, Scene Flow to Action Map (SFAM), that describes several long term spatio-temporal dynamics for action recognition. We adopt a channel transform kernel to transform the scene flow vectors to an optimal color space analogous to RGB. This transformation takes better advantage of the trained ConvNets models over ImageNet. Experimental results indicate that this new representation can surpass the performance of state-of-the-art methods on two large public datasets.

Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper proposes three simple, compact yet effective representations of depth sequences, referred to respectively as Dynamic Depth Images (DDI), Dynamic Depth Normal Images (DDNI) and Dynamic Depth Motion Normal Images (DDMNI). These dynamic images are constructed from a sequence of depth maps using bidirectional rank pooling to effectively capture the spatial-temporal information. Such image-based representations enable us to fine-tune the existing ConvNets models trained on image data for classification of depth sequences, without introducing large parameters to learn. Upon the proposed representations, a convolutional Neural networks (ConvNets) based method is developed for gesture recognition and evaluated on the Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition at the ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) challenge 2016. The method achieved 55.57\% classification accuracy and ranked $2^{nd}$ place in this challenge but was very close to the best performance even though we only used depth data.

Action Recognition Based on Joint Trajectory Maps with Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have recently shown promising performance in many computer vision tasks, especially image-based recognition. How to effectively apply ConvNets to sequence-based data is still an open problem. This paper proposes an effective yet simple method to represent spatio-temporal information carried in $3D$ skeleton sequences into three $2D$ images by encoding the joint trajectories and their dynamics into color distribution in the images, referred to as Joint Trajectory Maps (JTM), and adopts ConvNets to learn the discriminative features for human action recognition. Such an image-based representation enables us to fine-tune existing ConvNets models for the classification of skeleton sequences without training the networks afresh. The three JTMs are generated in three orthogonal planes and provide complimentary information to each other. The final recognition is further improved through multiply score fusion of the three JTMs. The proposed method was evaluated on four public benchmark datasets, the large NTU RGB+D Dataset, MSRC-12 Kinect Gesture Dataset (MSRC-12), G3D Dataset and UTD Multimodal Human Action Dataset (UTD-MHAD) and achieved the state-of-the-art results.