There is a large variation in the activities that humans perform in their everyday lives. We consider modeling these composite human activities which comprises multiple basic level actions in a completely unsupervised setting. Our model learns high-level co-occurrence and temporal relations between the actions. We consider the video as a sequence of short-term action clips, which contains human-words and object-words. An activity is about a set of action-topics and object-topics indicating which actions are present and which objects are interacting with. We then propose a new probabilistic model relating the words and the topics. It allows us to model long-range action relations that commonly exist in the composite activities, which is challenging in previous works. We apply our model to the unsupervised action segmentation and clustering, and to a novel application that detects forgotten actions, which we call action patching. For evaluation, we contribute a new challenging RGB-D activity video dataset recorded by the new Kinect v2, which contains several human daily activities as compositions of multiple actions interacting with different objects. Moreover, we develop a robotic system that watches and reminds people using our action patching algorithm. Our robotic setup can be easily deployed on any assistive robots.

We present a robotic system that watches a human using a Kinect v2 RGB-D sensor, detects what he forgot to do while performing an activity, and if necessary reminds the person using a laser pointer to point out the related object. Our simple setup can be easily deployed on any assistive robot. Our approach is based on a learning algorithm trained in a purely unsupervised setting, which does not require any human annotations. This makes our approach scalable and applicable to variant scenarios. Our model learns the action/object co-occurrence and action temporal relations in the activity, and uses the learned rich relationships to infer the forgotten action and the related object. We show that our approach not only improves the unsupervised action segmentation and action cluster assignment performance, but also effectively detects the forgotten actions on a challenging human activity RGB-D video dataset. In robotic experiments, we show that our robot is able to remind people of forgotten actions successfully.

We focus on modeling human activities comprising multiple actions in a completely unsupervised setting. Our model learns the high-level action co-occurrence and temporal relations between the actions in the activity video. We consider the video as a sequence of short-term action clips, called action-words, and an activity is about a set of action-topics indicating which actions are present in the video. Then we propose a new probabilistic model relating the action-words and the action-topics. It allows us to model long-range action relations that commonly exist in the complex activity, which is challenging to capture in the previous works. We apply our model to unsupervised action segmentation and recognition, and also to a novel application that detects forgotten actions, which we call action patching. For evaluation, we also contribute a new challenging RGB-D activity video dataset recorded by the new Kinect v2, which contains several human daily activities as compositions of multiple actions interacted with different objects. The extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our model.

Document clustering plays an important role in large scale textual data analysis, which generally faces with great challenge of the high dimensional textual data. One remedy is to learn the high-level sparse representation by the sparse coding techniques. In contrast to traditional Gaussian noise-based sparse coding methods, in this paper, we employ a Poisson distribution model to represent the word-count frequency feature of a text for sparse coding. Moreover, a novel sparse-constrained Poisson regression algorithm is proposed to solve the induced optimization problem. Different from previous Poisson regression with the family of ℓ1-regularization to enhance the sparse solution, we introduce a sparsity ratio measure which make use of both ℓ1-norm and ℓ2-norm on the learned weight. An important advantage of the sparsity ratio is that it bounded in the range of 0 and 1. This makes it easy to set for practical applications. To further make the algorithm trackable for the high dimensional textual data, a projected gradient descent algorithm is proposed to solve the regression problem. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show that our proposed approach can achieve effective representation for document clustering compared with state-of-the-art regression methods.

Recently, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become increasingly popular for feature extraction in computer vision and pattern recognition. NMF seeks two nonnegative matrices whose product can best approximate the original matrix. The nonnegativity constraints lead to sparse parts-based representations that can be more robust than nonsparse global features. To obtain more accurate control over the sparseness, in this paper, we propose a novel method called nonnegative local coordinate factorization (NLCF) for feature extraction. NLCF adds a local coordinate constraint into the standard NMF objective function. Specifically, we require that the learned basis vectors be as close to the original data points as possible. In this way, each data point can be represented by a linear combination of only a few nearby basis vectors, which naturally leads to sparse representation. Extensive experimental results suggest that the proposed approach provides a better representation and achieves higher accuracy in image clustering.

As the volumes of web images have grown rapidly in the last decade, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has attracted substantial interests as an effective tool to manage the images. Most existing CBIR systems focus on the object in the image, while ignoring the conditions (day/night, sunny/rain, etc) and the backgrounds, both of which are very helpful to meet the user's information need. To overcome this shortcoming, in this paper, we present a novel CBIR system depending on a novel query formulation considering three aspects: Object, Background and Condition. Specifically, we design a user-friendly interface to help the user formulate a query. The interface can allow the user to give the percentage, relative position and size of each object in the background. Moreover, a corresponding effective ranking method is proposed to return the desirable search results. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system improves the searching performance and the user experience compared with the existing searching systems.