Segmenting Visual Actions Based on Spatio-Temporal Motion Patterns

The analysis of human action captured in video sequences has been a topic of considerable interest in computer vision. Much of the previous work has focused on the problem of action or activity recognition, but ignored the problem of detecting action boundaries in a video sequence containing unfamiliar and arbitrary visual actions. This paper presents an approach to this problem based on detecting temporal discontinuities of the spatial pattern of image motion that captures the action. We represent frame to frame optical-flow in terms of the coefficients of the most significant principal components computed from all the flow-fields within a given video sequence. We then detect the discontinuities in the temporal trajectories of these coefficients based on three different measures. We compare our segment boundaries against those detected by human observers on the same sequences in a recent independent psychological study of human perception of visual events. We show experimental result...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Yong Rui, P. Anandan
• Keywords: Action Boundaries, Arbitrary Visual Actions, Computer Vision, CVPR 2000, Human Action, Independent Psychological Study, Temporal Discontinuities