Recognizing human actions in videos acquired by uncalibrated moving cameras

Most work in action recognition deals with sequences acquired by stationary cameras with fixed viewpoints. Due to the camera motion, the trajectories of the body parts contain not only the motion of the performing actor but also the motion of the camera. In addition to the camera motion, different viewpoints of the same action in different environments result in different trajectories, which can not be matched using standard approaches. In order to handle these problems, we propose to use the multi-view geometry between two actions. However, well known epipolar geometry of the static scenes where the cameras are stationary is not suitable for our task. Thus, we propose to extend the standard epipolar geometry to the geometry of dynamic scenes where the cameras are moving. We demonstrate the versatility of the proposed geometric approach for recognition of actions in a number of challenging sequences

[1]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Real-time American Sign Language recognition from video using hidden Markov models , 1995 .

[2]  Amnon Shashua,et al.  Threading Fundamental Matrices , 1998, ECCV.

[3]  Davi Geiger,et al.  Occlusions, Discontinuities, and Epipolar Lines in Stereo , 1998, ECCV.

[4]  Dariu Gavrila,et al.  The Visual Analysis of Human Movement: A Survey , 1999, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[5]  Randal C. Nelson,et al.  Recognizing activities , 1994, Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[6]  James W. Davis,et al.  The Recognition of Human Movement Using Temporal Templates , 2001, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[7]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Recognizing action at a distance , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[8]  Michael J. Black,et al.  Recognizing Facial Expressions in Image Sequences Using Local Parameterized Models of Image Motion , 1997, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[9]  Tanveer F. Syeda-Mahmood,et al.  View-invariant alignment and matching of video sequences , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[10]  Zhengyou Zhang,et al.  An Automatic and Robust Algorithm for Determining Motion and Structure from Two Perspective Images , 1995, CAIP.

[11]  Ivan Laptev,et al.  On Space-Time Interest Points , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[12]  Richard I. Hartley,et al.  In defence of the 8-point algorithm , 1995, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[13]  G. Johansson Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis , 1973 .

[14]  Andrew W. Fitzgibbon,et al.  Multibody Structure and Motion: 3-D Reconstruction of Independently Moving Objects , 2000, ECCV.

[15]  Mubarak Shah,et al.  View-Invariant Representation and Recognition of Actions , 2002, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[16]  Lior Wolf,et al.  On Projection Matrices Pk-> P2k=3, ..., 6, and their Applications in Computer Vision , 2002 .

[17]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  What can be seen in three dimensions with an uncalibrated stereo rig , 1992, ECCV.

[18]  Rama Chellappa,et al.  Quasi-invariants for human action representation and recognition , 2002, Object recognition supported by user interaction for service robots.

[19]  Emanuele Trucco,et al.  Introductory techniques for 3-D computer vision , 1998 .

[20]  Narendra Ahuja,et al.  Extraction of 2D Motion Trajectories and Its Application to Hand Gesture Recognition , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[21]  Lior Wolf,et al.  On Projection Matrices $$\mathcal{P}^k \to \mathcal{P}^2 ,k = 3,...,6, $$ and their Applications in Computer Vision , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[22]  James W. Davis,et al.  The Representation and Recognition of Action Using Temporal Templates , 1997, CVPR 1997.

[23]  Andrew Zisserman,et al.  Performance characterization of fundamental matrix estimation under image degradation , 1997, Machine Vision and Applications.

[24]  Mubarak Shah,et al.  Actions sketch: a novel action representation , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).

[25]  M. Alex O. Vasilescu,et al.  Recognizing action events from multiple viewpoints , 2001, Proceedings IEEE Workshop on Detection and Recognition of Events in Video.