Abstract: Computational color constancy is a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision applications. This paper presents a survey of many recent developments and state-of-the- art methods. Several criteria are proposed that are used to assess the approaches. A taxonomy of existing algorithms is proposed and methods are separated in three groups: static methods, gamut-based methods and learning-based methods. Further, the experimental setup is discussed including an overview of publicly available data sets. Finally, various freely available methods, of which some are considered to be state-of-the-art, are evaluated on two data sets.

Abstract: This paper describes an approach to human action recognition based on a probabilistic optimization model of body parts using hidden Markov model (HMM). Our method is able to distinguish between similar actions by only considering the body parts having major contribution to the actions, for example, legs for walking, jogging and running; arms for boxing, waving and clapping. We apply HMMs to model the stochastic movement of the body parts for action recognition. The HMM construction uses an ensemble of body-part detectors, followed by grouping of part detections, to perform human identification. Three example-based body-part detectors are trained to detect three components of the human body: the head, legs and arms. These detectors cope with viewpoint changes and self-occlusions through the use of ten sub-classifiers that detect body parts over a specific range of viewpoints. Each sub-classifier is a support vector machine trained on features selected for the discriminative power for each particular part/viewpoint combination. Grouping of these detections is performed using a simple geometric constraint model that yields a viewpoint-invariant human detector. We test our approach on three publicly available action datasets: the KTH dataset, Weizmann dataset and HumanEva dataset. Our results illustrate that with a simple and compact representation we can achieve robust recognition of human actions comparable to the most complex, state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.