Department Publications

Automatic stroke recognition of badminton video footages plays an important role in the process of analyzing players and building up statistics. Yet recognizing activities from broadcast videos is a challenging task due to person dependant body postures and blurring of the fast moving body parts. We propose a robust and an accurate approach for badminton stroke recognition using dense trajectories and trajectory aligned HOG features which are calculated inside local bounding boxes around players. A four-class SVM classifier is then used to classify badminton strokes to be either smash, forehand, backhand or other. This approach is robust to noisy backgrounds and provides accurate results for low resolution broadcast videos. Our experiments also reveal that this approach needs relatively fewer training samples for accurate recognition of strokes compared to existing approaches.

Abnormal activity detection plays an important role in many areas such as surveillance, military installations, and sports. Existing abnormal activity detectors mostly rely on motion data obtained over a number of frames to characterize abnormality. However, only motion may not be able to capture all forms of abnormality, in particular, poses that do not amount to motion "outliers". In this paper, we propose two different spatio-temporal descriptors, a silhouette and optic flow based method and a dense trajectory based method which additionally include trajectory shape descriptor, to detect abnormalities. These two descriptors enable us to classify abnormal versus non-abnormal activities using SVM. Comparison with existing methods, using five standard datasets, shows that dense trajectory based method outperforms state-of-the-art results in crowd dataset and silhouette and optic flow based method outperforms …

Transferring computational tasks from user-worn devices to everyday objects allows users to freely focus on their regular non-computing tasks. Identifying micro-activities (short-repetitive-activities that compose the macro-level behavior) enables the understanding of subtle behavioral changes and providing just-in-time information without explicit user input. In this paper, we propose the concept of micro-activity recognition of augmented-everyday-objects and evaluate the applicability of machine learning algorithms that are previously used for macro-level activity recognition. We outline a few proof-of-concept application scenarios that provide micro-activity-aware just-in-time information.

Action recognition in a video plays an important role in computer vision and finds many applications in areas such as surveillance, sports, and elderly monitoring. Existing methods mostly rely on stationary backgrounds. Action recognition in dynamic backgrounds typically requires standard preprocessing steps such as motion compensation, background modeling, moving object detection and object recognition. The errors of the motion compensation step and background modelling increase the mis-detections. Therefore action recognition in dynamic background is challenging. In this paper, we use a combination of pose characterized by a silhouette and optic flows synthesized into a histogram. This enables us to classify the movement of the actor versus movement of the background. We use four background models to extract the silhouette from the frame. We use SVM to recognize actions, according to several …

The biological world is an ideal place for seeking inspiration for developing mathematical optimization algorithms. In this paper we propose two hybrid stochastic optimization algorithms that bear resemblance to the sexual reproduction cycle of Jellyfish and asexual reproductive cycle of species of Hydra. The performance of these two algorithms are investigated against other common optimization algorithms on a set of benchmark optimization problems. The results show that the proposed algorithms perform well.