The clash between two worlds in human action recognition: supervised feature training vs Recurrent ConvNet

Abstract

Action recognition has been an active research topic for over three decades. There are various applications of action recognition, such as surveillance, human-computer interaction, and content-based retrieval. Recently, research focuses on movies, web videos, and TV shows datasets. The nature of these datasets make action recognition very challenging due to scene variability and complexity, namely background clutter, occlusions, viewpoint changes, fast irregular motion, and large spatio-temporal search space (articulation configurations and motions). The use of local space and time image features shows promising results, avoiding the cumbersome and often inaccurate frame-by-frame segmentation (boundary estimation). We focus on two state of the art methods for the action classification problem: dense trajectories and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Dense trajectories use typical supervised training (e.g., with Support Vector Machines) of features such as 3D-SIFT, extended SURF, HOG3D, and local trinary patterns; the main idea is to densely sample these features in each frame and track them in the sequence based on optical flow. On the other hand, the deep neural network uses the input frames to detect action and produce part proposals, i.e., estimate information on body parts (shapes and locations). We compare qualitatively and numerically these two approaches, indicative to what is used today, and describe our conclusions with respect to accuracy and efficiency.