In this paper, we propose a novel method for cross-view action recognition via multiple continuous virtual paths which connect the source view and the target view. Each point on one virtual path is a virtual view which is obtained by a linear transformation of an action descriptor. All the virtual views are concatenated into an infinite-dimensional feature to characterize continuous changes from the source to the target view. To utilize these infinite-dimensional features directly, we propose a virtual view kernel (VVK) to compute the similarity between two infinite-dimensional features, which can be readily used to construct any kernelized classifiers. In addition, a constraint term is introduced to fully utilize the information contained in the unlabeled samples which are easier to obtain from the target view. The rationality behind the constraint is that any action video belongs to only one class. To further explore complementary visual information, we utilize multiple continuous virtual paths. The original source and target views are projected to different auxiliary source and target views using the random projection technique. Then we fuse all the VVKs generated from all pairs of auxiliary views. Our method is verified on the IXMAS and MuHAVi datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Text information contained in scene images is very helpful for high‐level image understanding. In this study, the authors propose to learn co‐occurrence of local strokes for scene text recognition by using a spatiality embedded dictionary (SED). Unlike spatial pyramid partitioning images into grids to incorporate spatial information, the authors SED associates every codeword with a particular response region and introduces more precise spatial information for robust character recognition. After localised soft coding and max pooling of the first layer, a sparse dictionary is learned to model co‐occurrence of several local strokes, which further improves classification performance. Experimental results on two scene character recognition datasets ICDAR2003 and CHARS74 K demonstrate that their character recognition method outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods. Besides, competitive word recognition results are also reported for four benchmark word recognition datasets ICDAR2003, ICDAR2011, ICDAR2013 and street view text when combining their character recognition method with a conditional random field language model.

Robust scene-text-extraction system can be used in lots of areas. In this work, we propose to learn co-occurrence of local strokes for robust character recognition by using a spatiality embedded dictionary (SED). Different from spatial pyramid partitioning images into grids to incorporate spatial information, our SED associates every codeword with a particular response region and introduces more precise spatial information for character recognition. After localized soft coding and max pooling of the first layer, a sparse dictionary is learned to model co-occurrence of several local strokes, which further improves classification performance. Experiment on benchmark datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our method and the results outperform state-of-the-art algorithms.

Pooling strategies, such as max pooling and sum pooling, have been widely used to obtain the global representations for action videos. However, these pooling strategies have several disadvantages. First, they are easily affected by unwanted background local features, the absence of discriminative local features and the times of actions periodically performed by actors. Second, most pooling strategies only use local features to build the global representation that captures little mid‐level features for action representation. In this study, the authors propose a novel weighted pooling strategy based on actionlets representation for action recognition. The actionlets are defined as the movements of large bodies such as legs, arms and head, which capture rich mid‐level features for action representation. Besides, the authors’ method also incorporates the distribution information of actionlets into pooling procedure. Specifically, a pooling weight, which determines the importance of actionlet on the final video representation, is assigned to each actionlet. To learn the weight, they propose a novel discriminative learning algorithm to capture the discriminative information for pooling operation. They evaluate their weighted pooling on three datasets: KTH actions dataset, UCF sports dataset and Youtube actions dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Image matching based on local features is a challenging task because it is difficult to build a robust local descriptor which is invariant to large variations in scale, viewpoints, illumination and rotation. To address these issues, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor has been proposed to build a robust and distinctive local descriptor. However, it is not fully affine invariant. In this letter, we propose a novel robust descriptor: Sampling based Local Descriptor (SLD) to perform reliable image matching under large variations in scale, viewpoints, illumination and rotation. We build the descriptor based on elliptical sampling which samples image pixels according to the elliptic equations. The main advantage of elliptical sampling is that two controllable parameters of elliptical sampling can generate descriptors with different viewpoints and rotations. Besides, the descriptor has two notable properties: 1) it is fully invariant to affine changes; 2) it enables fast matching process because we only need to search two controllable parameters for elliptical sampling, which is more efficient than other affine invariant descriptors. We test the proposed descriptor on standard benchmark for evaluation. Experimental results show the robustness of the proposed method under large variations in illumination, viewpoints and scale.

Recently, maximum margin clustering (MMC) has been proposed for a cross-view action recognition. However, such a method neglects the temporal relationship between contiguous frames in the same action video. In this paper we propose a novel method called contextual maximum margin clustering (CMMC) to tackle cross-view action recognition. In CMMC, we add temporal regularization to give a high penalty when the contiguous frames are dissimilar. Thus, the CMMC not only achieves the goal of finding maximum margin hyperplanes, but also explicitly considers the temporal information among contiguous frames. Our method is verified on the IXMAS dataset and the experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for cross-view action recognition via a continuous virtual path which connects the source view and the target view. Each point on this virtual path is a virtual view which is obtained by a linear transformation of the action descriptor. All the virtual views are concatenated into an infinite-dimensional feature to characterize continuous changes from the source to the target view. However, these infinite-dimensional features cannot be used directly. Thus, we propose a virtual view kernel to compute the value of similarity between two infinite-dimensional features, which can be readily used to construct any kernelized classifiers. In addition, there are a lot of unlabeled samples from the target view, which can be utilized to improve the performance of classifiers. Thus, we present a constraint strategy to explore the information contained in the unlabeled samples. The rationality behind the constraint is that any action video belongs to only one class. Our method is verified on the IXMAS dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, attributes have been introduced as a kind of high-level semantic information to help improve the classification accuracy. Multitask learning is an effective methodology to achieve this goal, which shares low-level features between attributes and actions. Yet such methods neglect the constraints that attributes impose on classes, which may fail to constrain the semantic relationship between the attributes and actions. In this paper, we explicitly consider such attribute-action relationship for human action recognition, and correspondingly, we modify the multitask learning model by adding attribute regularization. In this way, the learned model not only shares the low-level features, but also gets regularized according to the semantic constrains. In addition, since attribute and class label contain different amounts of semantic information, we separately treat attribute classifiers and action classifiers in the framework of multitask learning for further performance improvement. Our method is verified on three challenging datasets (KTH, UIUC, and Olympic Sports), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better results than that of previous methods on human action recognition.

Background modeling from a stationary camera is a crucial component in video surveillance. Traditional methods usually adopt single feature type to solve the problem, while the performance is usually unsatisfactory when handling complex scenes. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale strategy, which combines both texture and color features, to achieve a robust and accurate solution. Our contributions are two folds: one is that we propose a novel textureoperator named Scale-invariant Center-symmetric Local Ternary Pattern, which is robust to noise and illumination variations, the other is that a multi-scale fusion strategy is proposed for the issue. Our method is verified on several complex real world videoswith illumination variation, soft shadows and dynamic backgrounds. We compare our method with four state-of-the-art methods, and the experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method achievesthe highest classification accuracy in complex real world videos.

Recently, attributes have been introduced to help object classification. Multi-task learning is an effective methodology to achieve this goal, which shares low-level features between attribute and object classifiers. Yet such a method neglects the constraints that attributes impose on classes which may fail to constrain the semantic relationship between the attribute and object classifiers. In this paper, we explicitly consider such attribute-object relationship, and correspondingly, we modify the multi-task learningmodel by adding attribute regularization. In this way, the learned model not only shares the low-level features, but also gets regularized according to the semantic constrains. Our method is verified on two challenging datasets (KTH and Olympic Sports), andthe experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better results than previous methods in human action recognition.

In this paper, we propose a discriminative low-rank dictionary learning algorithm for sparse representation. Sparse representation seeks the sparsest coefficients to represent the test signal as linear combination of the bases in an over-complete dictionary. Motivated by low-rank matrix recovery and completion, assume that the data from the same pattern are linearly correlated, if we stack these data points as column vectors of a dictionary, then the dictionary should be approximately low-rank. An objective function with sparse coefficients, class discrimination and rank minimization is proposed and optimized during dictionary learning. We have applied the algorithm for face recognition. Numerous experiments with improved performances over previous dictionary learning methods validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Although traditional bag-of-words model has shown promising results for action recognition, it takes no consideration of the relationship among spatio–temporal points; furthermore, it also suffers serious quantization error. In this letter, we propose a novel coding strategy called context-constrained linear coding (CLC) to overcome these limitations. We first calculate the contextual distance between local descriptors and each codeword by considering the spatio–temporal contextual information. Then, linear coding using contextual distance is adopted to alleviate the quantization error. Our method is verified on two challenging databases (KTH and UCF sports), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better results than previous methods in action recognition.