Action recognition by hidden temporal models

We focus on the recognition of human actions in uncontrolled videos that may contain complex temporal structures. It is a difficult problem because of the large intra-class variations in viewpoint, video length, motion pattern, etc. To address these difficulties, we propose a novel system in this paper that represents each action class by hidden temporal models. In this system, we represent the crucial action event per category by a video segment that covers a fixed number of frames and can move temporally within the sequences. To capture the temporal structures, the video segment is described by a temporal pyramid model. To capture large intra-class variations, multiple models are combined using Or operation to represent alternative structures. The index of model and the start frame of segment are both treated as hidden variables. We implement a learning procedure based on the latent SVM method. The proposed approach is tested on two difficult benchmarks: the Olympic Sports and HMDB51 data sets. The experimental results reveal that our system is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods in the literature.