Action recognition with trajectory-pooled deep-convolutional descriptors

Visual features are of vital importance for human action understanding in videos. This paper presents a new video representation, called trajectory-pooled deep-convolutional descriptor (TDD), which shares the merits of both hand-crafted features 31 and deep-learned features 24. Specifically, we utilize deep architectures to learn discriminative convolutional feature maps, and conduct trajectory-constrained pooling to aggregate these convolutional features into effective descriptors. To enhance the robustness of TDDs, we design two normalization methods to transform convolutional feature maps, namely spatiotemporal normalization and channel normalization. The advantages of our features come from (i) TDDs are automatically learned and contain high discriminative capacity compared with those hand-crafted features; (ii) TDDs take account of the intrinsic characteristics of temporal dimension and introduce the strategies of trajectory-constrained sampling and pooling for aggregating deep-learned features. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: HMD-B51 and UCF101. Experimental results show that TDDs outperform previous hand-crafted features 31 and deep-learned features 24. Our method also achieves superior performance to the state of the art on these datasets.