Abstract: In pattern recognition [8, 14], a key issue to be addressed when designing a system is how to represent input patterns. Feature vectors is a common option. That is, a set of numerical features describing relevant properties of the pattern are computed and arranged in a vector form. The main advantages of this kind of representation are computational simplicity and a well sound mathematical foundation. Thus, a large number of operations are available to work with vectors and a large repository of algorithms for pattern analysis and classification exist. However, the simple structure of feature vectors might not be the best option for complex patterns where nonnumerical features or relations between different parts of the pattern become relevant.

Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 1.14 / 3rd (Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence)
We introduce a model of attentional eye guidance based on the rationale that the deployment of gaze is to be considered in the context of a general action-perception loop relying on two strictly intertwined processes: sensory processing, depending on current gaze position, identifies sources of information that are most valuable under the given task; motor processing links such information with the oculomotor act by sampling the next gaze position and thus performing the gaze shift. In such a framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the payoff of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects. The different levels of the action-perception loop are represented in probabilistic form and eventually give rise to a stochastic process that generates the gaze sequence. This way the model also accounts for statistical properties of gaze shifts such as individual scan path variability. Results of the simulations are compared either with experimental data derived from publicly available datasets and from our own experiments.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel method for continuous visual event recognition (CVER) on a large scale video dataset using max-margin Hough transformation framework. Due to high scalability, diverse real environmental state and wide scene variability direct application of action recognition/detection methods such as spatio-temporal interest point (STIP)-local feature based technique, on the whole dataset is practically infeasible. To address this problem, we apply a motion region extraction technique which is based on motion segmentation and region clustering to identify possible candidate “event of interest” as a preprocessing step. On these candidate regions a STIP detector is applied and local motion features are computed. For activity representation we use generalized Hough transform framework where each feature point casts a weighted vote for possible activity class centre. A max-margin frame work is applied to learn the feature codebook weight. For activity detection, peaks in the Hough voting space are taken into account and initial event hypothesis is generated using the spatio-temporal information of the participating STIPs. For event recognition a verification Support Vector Machine is used. An extensive evaluation on benchmark large scale video surveillance dataset (VIRAT) and as well on a small scale benchmark dataset (MSR) shows that the proposed method is applicable on a wide range of continuous visual event recognition applications having extremely challenging conditions.