Video motion description based on histograms of sparse trajectories

Abstract

Motion description has been a challenging and popular theme over many years within computer vision and signal processing, but also very closely related to machine learn ing and pattern recognition. Very frequently, to address this task, one extracts motion information from image sequences and encodes this information into a descriptor. This work presents a simple and fast computing method to extract this information and en code it into descriptors based on histograms of relative displacements. Our descriptors are compact, global, meaning it aggregates information from whole frames, and what we call self-descriptors, meaning they do not depend on information from sequences other than the one we want to describe. To validate these descriptors and compare them to other works, we use them in the context of Human Action Recognition, where scenes are classified according to the action portrayed. In this validation, we achieve results that are comparable to those in the state-of-the-art for the KTH dataset. We also evaluate our method on the UCF11 and Hollywood2 datasets, with lower recognition rates, considering their higher complexity. Our approach is a promising one, due to the fairly good recogni tion rates we obtain with a much less complex method than those of the state-of-the-art, in terms of speed of computation and final descriptor compactness. Additionally, we ex periment with the use of Metric Learning in the classification of our descriptors, aiming to improve the separability and compactness of the descriptors. Our results for Metric Learning show inferior recognition rates, but great improvement for the compactness of the descriptors.