Capturing the relative distribution of features for action recognition

This paper presents an approach to the categorisation of spatio-temporal activity in video, which is based solely on the relative distribution of feature points. Introducing a Relative Motion Descriptor for actions in video, we show that the spatio-temporal distribution of features alone (without explicit appearance information) effectively describes actions, and demonstrate performance consistent with state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we propose that for actions where noisy examples exist, it is not optimal to group all action examples as a single class. Therefore, rather than engineering features that attempt to generalise over noisy examples, our method follows a different approach: We make use of Random Sampling Consensus (RANSAC) to automatically discover and reject outlier examples within classes. We evaluate the Relative Motion Descriptor and outlier rejection approaches on four action datasets, and show that outlier rejection using RANSAC provides a consistent and notable increase in performance, and demonstrate superior performance to more complex multiple-feature based approaches.