Abstract: In this article we investigate the problem of human action recognition in static images. By action recognition we intend a class of problems which includes both action classification and action detection (i.e. simultaneous localization and classification). Bag-of-words image representations yield promising results for action classification, and deformable part models perform very well object detection. The representations for action recognition typically use only shape cues and ignore color information. Inspired by the recent success of color in image classification and object detection, we investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in static images. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of color descriptors and fusion approaches for action recognition. Experiments were conducted on the three datasets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010 and Stanford-40. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating color information considerably improves recognition performance, and that a descriptor based on color names outperforms pure color descriptors. Our experiments demonstrate that late fusion of color and shape information outperforms other approaches on action recognition. Finally, we show that the different color–shape fusion approaches result in complementary information and combining them yields state-of-the-art performance for action classification.

Abstract: Video alignment is important in different areas of computer vision such as wide baseline matching, action recognition, change detection, video copy detection and frame dropping prevention. Current video alignment methods usually deal with a relatively simple case of fixed or rigidly attached cameras or simultaneous acquisition. Therefore, in this paper we propose a joint video alignment for bringing two video sequences into a spatio-temporal alignment. Specifically, the novelty of the paper is to formulate the video alignment to fold the spatial and temporal alignment into a single alignment framework. This simultaneously satisfies a frame-correspondence and frame-alignment similarity; exploiting the knowledge among neighbor frames by a standard pairwise Markov random field (MRF). This new formulation is able to handle the alignment of sequences recorded at different times by independent moving cameras that follows a similar trajectory, and also generalizes the particular cases that of fixed geometric transformation and/or linear temporal mapping. We conduct experiments on different scenarios such as sequences recorded simultaneously or by moving cameras to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The proposed method provides the highest video alignment accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods on sequences recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times.

Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has become an important topic in the pattern recognition community, and many solutions to this problemhave been proposed until now. Despite this fact, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light into the characteristics and behavior of the different methods. In this work we provide such an analysis focused on the classification task (i.e.,leaving out other learning tasks such as regression). In order to perform our study, we implemented
fourteen methods grouped into three different families. We analyze the performance of the approaches across a variety of well-known databases, and we also study their behavior in synthetic scenarios in order to highlight their characteristics. As a result of this analysis, we conclude that methods that extract global bag-level information show a clearly superior performance in general. In this sense, the analysis permits us to understand why some types of methods are more successful than others, and it permits us to establish guidelines in the design of new MIL
methods.