Multimedia event detection with multimodal feature fusion and temporal concept localization

We present a system for multimedia event detection. The developed system characterizes complex multimedia events based on a large array of multimodal features, and classifies unseen videos by effectively fusing diverse responses. We present three major technical innovations. First, we explore novel visual and audio features across multiple semantic granularities, including building, often in an unsupervised manner, mid-level and high-level features upon low-level features to enable semantic understanding. Second, we show a novel Latent SVM model which learns and localizes discriminative high-level concepts in cluttered video sequences. In addition to improving detection accuracy beyond existing approaches, it enables a unique summary for every retrieval by its use of high-level concepts and temporal evidence localization. The resulting summary provides some transparency into why the system classified the video as it did. Finally, we present novel fusion learning algorithms and our methodology to improve fusion learning under limited training data condition. Thorough evaluation on a large TRECVID MED 2011 dataset showcases the benefits of the presented system.     

E-LAMP: integration of innovative ideas for multimedia event detection

Detecting multimedia events in web videos is an emerging hot research area in the fields of multimedia and computer vision. In this paper, we introduce the core methods and technologies of the framework we developed recently for our Event Labeling through Analytic Media Processing (E-LAMP) system to deal with different aspects of the overall problem of event detection. More specifically, we have developed efficient methods for feature extraction so that we are able to handle large collections of video data with thousands of hours of videos. Second, we represent the extracted raw features in a spatial bag-of-words model with more effective tilings such that the spatial layout information of different features and different events can be better captured, thus the overall detection performance can be improved. Third, different from widely used early and late fusion schemes, a novel algorithm is developed to learn a more robust and discriminative intermediate feature representation from multiple features so that better event models can be built upon it. Finally, to tackle the additional challenge of event detection with only very few positive exemplars, we have developed a novel algorithm which is able to effectively adapt the knowledge learnt from auxiliary sources to assist the event detection. Both our empirical results and the official evaluation results on TRECVID MED’11 and MED’12 demonstrate the excellent performance of the integration of these ideas.     

Video Semantic Event/Concept Detection Using a Subspace-Based Multimedia Data Mining Framework

In this paper, a subspace-based multimedia data mining framework is proposed for video semantic analysis, specifically video event/concept detection, by addressing two basic issues, i.e., semantic gap and rare event/concept detection. The proposed framework achieves full automation via multimodal content analysis and intelligent integration of distance-based and rule-based data mining techniques. The content analysis process facilitates the comprehensive video analysis by extracting low-level and middle-level features from audio/visual channels. The integrated data mining techniques effectively address these two basic issues by alleviating the class imbalance issue along the process and by reconstructing and refining the feature dimension automatically. The promising experimental performance on goal/corner event detection and sports/commercials/building concepts extraction from soccer videos and TRECVID news collections demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Furthermore, its unique domain-free characteristic indicates the great potential of extending the proposed multimedia data mining framework to a wide range of different application domains.     

An efficient multi-feature SVM solver for complex event detection

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Multimedia event detection (MED) has become one of the most important visual content analysis tools as the rapid growth of the user generated videos on the...     

Integrated Mining of Visual Features, Speech Features, and Frequent Patterns for Semantic Video Annotation

To support effective multimedia information retrieval, video annotation has become an important topic in video content analysis. Existing video annotation methods put the focus on either the analysis of low-level features or simple semantic concepts, and they cannot reduce the gap between low-level features and high-level concepts. In this paper, we propose an innovative method for semantic video annotation through integrated mining of visual features, speech features, and frequent semantic patterns existing in the video. The proposed method mainly consists of two main phases: 1) Construction of four kinds of predictive annotation models, namely speech-association, visual-association, visual-sequential, and statistical models from annotated videos. 2) Fusion of these models for annotating un-annotated videos automatically. The main advantage of the proposed method lies in that all visual features, speech features, and semantic patterns are considered simultaneously. Moreover, the utilization of high-level rules can effectively complement the insufficiency of statistics-based methods in dealing with complex and broad keyword identification in video annotation. Through empirical evaluation on NIST TRECVID video datasets, the proposed approach is shown to enhance the performance of annotation substantially in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure.     

Video data mining: semantic indexing and event detection from the association perspective

Advances in the media and entertainment industries, including streaming audio and digital TV, present new challenges for managing and accessing large audio-visual collections. Current content management systems support retrieval using low-level features, such as motion, color, and texture. However, low-level features often have little meaning for naive users, who much prefer to identify content using high-level semantics or concepts. This creates a gap between systems and their users that must be bridged for these systems to be used effectively. To this end, in this paper, we first present a knowledge-based video indexing and content management framework for domain specific videos (using basketball video as an example). We will provide a solution to explore video knowledge by mining associations from video data. The explicit definitions and evaluation measures (e.g., temporal support and confidence) for video associations are proposed by integrating the distinct feature of video data. Our approach uses video processing techniques to find visual and audio cues (e.g., court field, camera motion activities, and applause), introduces multilevel sequential association mining to explore associations among the audio and visual cues, classifies the associations by assigning each of them with a class label, and uses their appearances in the video to construct video indices. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.     

Impact of the motion and visual complexity of the background on players' performance in video game-like displays

The visual interfaces of virtual environments such as video games often show scenes where objects are superimposed on a moving background. Three experiments were designed to better understand the impact of the complexity and/or overall motion of two types of visual backgrounds often used in video games on the detection and use of superimposed, stationary items. The impact of background complexity and motion was assessed during two typical video game tasks: a relatively complex visual search task and a classic, less demanding shooting task. Background motion impaired participants' performance only when they performed the shooting game task, and only when the simplest of the two backgrounds was used. In contrast, and independently of background motion, performance on both tasks was impaired when the complexity of the background increased. Eye movement recordings demonstrated that most of the findings reflected the impact of low-level features of the two backgrounds on gaze control.     

Fusing bio-inspired vision data for simplified high level scene interpretation: Application to face motion analysis

This paper proposes to demonstrate the advantages of using certain properties of the human visual system in order to develop a set of fusion algorithms for automatic analysis and interpretation of global and local facial motions. The proposed fusion algorithms rely on information coming from human vision models such as human retina and primary visual cortex previously developed at Gipsa-lab. Starting from a set of low level bio-inspired modules (static and moving contour detector, motion event detector and spectrum analyser) which are very efficient for video data pre-processing, it is shown how to organize them together in order to achieve reliable face motion interpretation. In particular, algorithms for global head motion analysis such as head nods, for local eye motion analysis such as blinking, for local mouth motion analysis such as speech lip motion and yawning and for open/close mouth/eye state detection are proposed and their performances are assessed. Thanks to the use of human vision model pre-processing which decorrelates visual information in a reliable manner, fusion algorithms are simplified and remain robust against traditional video acquisition problems (light changes, object detection failure, etc.).     

A three-level framework for affective content analysis and its case studies

Emotional factors directly reflect audiences’ attention, evaluation and memory. Recently, video affective content analysis attracts more and more research efforts. Most of the existing methods map low-level affective features directly to emotions by applying machine learning. Compared to human perception process, there is actually a gap between low-level features and high-level human perception of emotion. In order to bridge the gap, we propose a three-level affective content analysis framework by introducing mid-level representation to indicate dialog, audio emotional events (e.g., horror sounds and laughters) and textual concepts (e.g., informative keywords). Mid-level representation is obtained from machine learning on low-level features and used to infer high-level affective content. We further apply the proposed framework and focus on a number of case studies. Audio emotional event, dialog and subtitle are studied to assist affective content detection in different video domains/genres. Multiple modalities are considered for affective analysis, since different modality has its own merit to evoke emotions. Experimental results shows the proposed framework is effective and efficient for affective content analysis. Audio emotional event, dialog and subtitle are promising mid-level representations.     

A visual word weighting scheme based on emerging itemsets for video annotation

The method based on Bag-of-visual-Words (BoW) deriving from local keypoints has recently appeared promising for video annotation. Visual word weighting scheme has critical impact to the performance of BoW method. In this paper, we propose a new visual word weighting scheme which is referred as emerging patterns weighting (EP-weighting). The EP-weighting scheme can efficiently capture the co-occurrence relationships of visual words and improve the effectiveness of video annotation. The proposed scheme firstly finds emerging patterns (EPs) of visual keywords in training dataset. And then an adaptive weighting assignment is performed for each visual word according to EPs. The adjusted BoW features are used to train classifiers for video annotation. A systematic performance study on TRECVID corpus containing 20 semantic concepts shows that the proposed scheme is more effective than other popular existing weighting schemes.     

视频显著性检测研究进展

视频显著性检测是计算机视觉领域的一个热点研究方向,其目的在于通过联合空间和时间信息实现视频序列中与运动相关的显著性目标的连续提取.由于视频序列中目标运动模式多样、场景复杂以及存在相机运动等,使得视频显著性检测极具挑战性.本文将对现有的视频显著性检测方法进行梳理,介绍相关实验数据集,并通过实验比较分析现有方法的性能.首先,本文介绍了基于底层线索的视频显著性检测方法,主要包括基于变换分析的方法、基于稀疏表示的方法、基于信息论的方法、基于视觉先验的方法和其他方法五类.然后,对基于学习的视频显著性检测方法进行了总结,主要包括传统学习方法和深度学习方法,并着重对后一类方法进行了介绍.随后,介绍了常用的视频显著性检测数据集,给出了四种算法性能评价指标,并在不同数据集上对最新的几种算法进行了定性和定量的比较分析.最后,对视频显著性检测的关键问题进行了总结,并对未来的发展趋势进行了展望.     

Abnormal visual event detection based on multi-instance learning and autoregressive integrated moving average model in edge-based Smart City surveillance

The abnormal visual event detection is an important subject in Smart City surveillance where a lot of data can be processed locally in edge computing environment. Real-time and detection effectiveness are critical in such an edge environment. In this paper, we propose an abnormal event detection approach based on multi-instance learning and autoregressive integrated moving average model for video surveillance of crowded scenes in urban public places, focusing on real-time and detection effectiveness. We propose an unsupervised method for abnormal event detection by combining multi-instance visual feature selection and the autoregressive integrated moving average model. In the proposed method, each video clip is modeled as a visual feature bag containing several subvideo clips, each of which is regarded as an instance. The time-transform characteristics of the optical flow characteristics within each subvideo clip are considered as a visual feature instance, and time-series modeling is carried out for multiple visual feature instances related to all subvideo clips in a surveillance video clip. The abnormal events in each surveillance video clip are detected using the multi-instance fusion method. This approach is verified on publically available urban surveillance video datasets and compared with state-of-the-art alternatives. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has better abnormal event detection performance for crowded scene of urban public places with an edge environment.     

基于局部和全局特征视觉单词的人物行为识别

基于视觉单词的人物行为识别由于在特征中加入了中层语义信息,因此提高了识别的准确性。然而,视觉单词提取时由于前景和背景存在相互干扰,使得视觉单词的表达能力受到影响。提出一种结合局部和全局特征的视觉单词生成方法。该方法首先用显著图检测出前景人物区域,采用提出的动态阈值矩阵对人物区域用不同的阈值来分别检测时空兴趣点,并计算周围的3D-SIFT特征来描述局部信息。在此基础上,采用光流直方图特征描述行为的全局运动信息。通过谱聚类将局部和全局特征融合成视觉单词。实验证明,相对于流行的局部特征视觉单词生成方法,所提出的方法在简单背景的KTH数据集上的识别率比平均识别率提高了6.4%,在复杂背景的UCF数据集上的识别率比平均识别率提高了6.5%。