Combining Spatial Proximity and Temporal Continuity for Learning Invariant Representations

Location and time are two critical aspects of most security-related events, and thus, spatiotemporal data analysis plays a central role in many security-related applications. The human brain has great capabilities of developing invariant representations of objects by taking advantage of both spatial similarity of features of objects/events and their relative timings (temporal information). Trace learning rule is one well-known solution for this problem of combining temporal relations with spatial proximity in clustering tasks such as the one performed by self organizing maps. In this work, we investigate a two stage mechanism: i) finding local clusters using spatial proximity, ii) grouping these clusters as suggested by temporal continuity patterns. We show our experimental results on a movie created from face images.