The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly use audio-visual cues derived from the video, we propose an approach that additionally leverages contextual cues derived from the environment that the game is being played in. The contextual cues provide information about the excitement levels in the game, which can be ranked and selected to automatically produce high-quality basketball highlights. We introduce a new dataset of 25 NCAA games along with their play-by-play stats and the ground-truth excitement data for each basket. We explore the informativeness of five different cues derived from the video and from the environment through user studies. Our experiments show that for our study participants, the highlights produced by our system are comparable to the ones produced by ESPN for the same games.

We present an approach for identifying picturesque highlights from large amounts of egocentric video data. Given a set of egocentric videos captured over the course of a vacation, our method analyzes the videos and looks for images that have good picturesque and artistic properties. We introduce novel techniques to automatically determine aesthetic features such as composition, symmetry and color vibrancy in egocentric videos and rank the video frames based on their photographic qualities to generate highlights. Our approach also uses contextual information such as GPS, when available, to assess the relative importance of each geographic location where the vacation videos were shot. Furthermore, we specifically leverage the properties of egocentric videos to improve our highlight detection. We demonstrate results on a new egocentric vacation dataset which includes 26.5 hours of videos taken over a 14 day vacation that spans many famous tourist destinations and also provide results from a user-study to access our results.

We present a technique that uses images, videos and sensor data taken from first-person point-of-view devices to perform egocentric field-of-view (FOV) localization. We define egocentric FOV localization as capturing the visual information from a person's field-of-view in a given environment and transferring this information onto a reference corpus of images and videos of the same space, hence determining what a person is attending to. Our method matches images and video taken from the first-person perspective with the reference corpus and refines the results using the first-person's head orientation information obtained using the device sensors. We demonstrate single and multi-user egocentric FOV localization in different indoor and outdoor environments with applications in augmented reality, event understanding and studying social interactions.

The pervasiveness of mobile cameras has resulted in a dramatic increase in food photos, which are pictures reflecting what people eat. In this paper, we study how taking pictures of what we eat in restaurants can be used for the purpose of automating food journaling. We propose to leverage the context of where the picture was taken, with additional information about the restaurant, available online, coupled with state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to recognize the food being consumed. To this end, we demonstrate image-based recognition of foods eaten in restaurants by training a classifier with images from restaurant's online menu databases. We evaluate the performance of our system in unconstrained, real-world settings with food images taken in 10 restaurants across 5 different types of food (American, Indian, Italian, Mexican and Thai).

We present data-driven techniques to augment Bag of Words (BoW) models, which allow for more robust modeling and recognition of complex long-term activities, especially when the structure and topology of the activities are not known a priori. Our approach specifically addresses the limitations of standard BoW approaches, which fail to represent the underlying temporal and causal information that is inherent in activity streams. In addition, we also propose the use of randomly sampled regular expressions to discover and encode patterns in activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in experimental evaluations where we successfully recognize activities and detect anomalies in four complex datasets.

This paper reports on methods and results of an applied research project by a team consisting of SAIC and four universities to develop, integrate, and evaluate new approaches to detect the weak signals characteristic of insider threats on organizations' information systems. Our system combines structural and semantic information from a real corporate database of monitored activity on their users' computers to detect independently developed red team inserts of malicious insider activities. We have developed and applied multiple algorithms for anomaly detection based on suspected scenarios of malicious insider behavior, indicators of unusual activities, high-dimensional statistical patterns, temporal sequences, and normal graph evolution. Algorithms and representations for dynamic graph processing provide the ability to scale as needed for enterprise-level deployments on real-time data streams. We have also developed a visual language for specifying combinations of features, baselines, peer groups, time periods, and algorithms to detect anomalies suggestive of instances of insider threat behavior. We defined over 100 data features in seven categories based on approximately 5.5 million actions per day from approximately 5,500 users. We have achieved area under the ROC curve values of up to 0.979 and lift values of 65 on the top 50 user-days identified on two months of real data.

Activity recognition in the home has been long recognized as the foundation for many desirable applications in fields such as home automation, sustainability, and healthcare. However, building a practical home activity monitoring system remains a challenge. Striking a balance between cost, privacy, ease of installation and scalability continues to be an elusive goal. In this paper, we explore infrastructure-mediated sensing combined with a vector space model learning approach as the basis of an activity recognition system for the home. We examine the performance of our single-sensor water-based system in recognizing eleven high-level activities in the kitchen and bathroom, such as cooking and shaving. Results from two studies show that our system can estimate activities with overall accuracy of 82.69% for one individual and 70.11% for a group of 23 participants. As far as we know, our work is the first to employ infrastructure-mediated sensing for inferring high-level human activities in a home setting.