Transferring Object-Scene Convolutional Neural Networks for Event Recognition in Still Images

Event recognition in still images is an intriguing problem and has potential for real applications. This paper addresses the problem of event recognition by proposing a convolutional neural network that exploits knowledge of objects and scenes for event classification (OS2E-CNN). Intuitively, it stands to reason that there exists a correlation among the concepts of objects, scenes, and events. We empirically demonstrate that the recognition of objects and scenes substantially contributes to the recognition of events. Meanwhile, we propose an iterative selection method to identify a subset of object and scene classes, which help to more efficiently and effectively transfer their deep representations to event recognition. Specifically, we develop three types of transferring techniques: (1) initialization-based transferring, (2) knowledge-based transferring, and (3) data-based transferring. These newly designed transferring techniques exploit multi-task learning frameworks to incorporate extra knowledge from other networks and additional datasets into the training procedure of event CNNs. These multi-task learning frameworks turn out to be effective in reducing the effect of over-fitting and improving the generalization ability of the learned CNNs. With OS2E-CNN, we design a multi-ratio and multi-scale cropping strategy, and propose an end-to-end event recognition pipeline. We perform experiments on three event recognition benchmarks: the ChaLearn Cultural Event Recognition dataset, the Web Image Dataset for Event Recognition (WIDER), and the UIUC Sports Event dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm successfully adapts object and scene representations towards the event dataset and that it achieves the current state-of-the-art performance on these challenging datasets.